4. Barriers

They set off from the shuttle in subdued silence, their gliders heavy with weaponry, Shadow tightly wrapped around themselves.

They were dragging the barrier generators behind them; each of them was the size of a small energy-fount, large enough to be held in both hands. Lành had taken one look at them and reeled off a full list of technical specifications at a high clip, before Nhi put a hand on her shoulder and took her to a corner to sit down. Hac Cúc had forced herself not to intervene, despite her itch to cut Lành to size. Knowing the full list of specifications was typically Lành—never waste an occasion to look good—but she'd fail them on some level before the mission was through. Missions required courage to stand up, and Lành didn't have that. There would be someone or something, some representative of authority she'd end up toadying to. Even if she didn't fold before, during the tangler's capture. No, Hac Cúc would do the sensible thing, and consider Lành an asset that was unreliable at best, and actively malicious at worst. She genuinely couldn't understand what her s? ph? had seen in Lành. Saving her was one thing, but insisting Lành was worthy of him, and teaching her? How could he?

Hac Cúc had activated the magnetic clamps on her wrists to secure her position on the glider, and drawn her weapons. She was trying to remember everything about the Hollows she could, but most of the experience of a navigator was swathes of Shadow, odd lights, and a strange and tense feeling that nothing was quite making sense. She'd been lucky enough to only run into a tangler once, and it had been enough of an experience that she didn't feel like repeating it. Hac Cúc liked being the hunter, but much less being the one hunted.

Nhi was sticking close to Hac Cúc, her Shadow—Heavenly Weave—was slow and ponderous, gently brushing against Hac Cúc's from time to time. It almost felt like they were standing side by side in spite of the layers of suits. It was … soothing. Everything she couldn't allow herself.

Lành was lagging behind, her own string of barrier generators slowly and lazily changing directions behind her because of her low speed. She had come along for appearance's sake. Or because Nhi could be strangely persuasive when she talked to people—her face aglow with an odd intensity that made Hac Cúc's heart feel ten thousand sizes too big for her chest.

Hac Cúc forced herself to focus on the tangler. At least that bit was predictable. She had asked Quang L?c about killing a tangler, and her s? ph? had sounded thoughtful as he'd explained an ancestral clan technique, the Rain Cleaving Sharpness: a careful manipulation of Shadow that was meant to cut into a tangler's body.

Hac Cúc had tried it in the cave, and it had worked, but it had drained her and made her more irritable than usual. And this had been a couple of small tanglers, still clinging to the walls. She couldn't even imagine what it would take to down a larger one.

Maybe, just maybe, she couldn't quite blame Lành for being so scared.

"I've pinged Bao Duy," Nhi said. "Nothing. She's cut off her comms, I think."

Of course. Didn't want anyone to interfere with whatever scatterbrained plan she'd come up with. Something to see the tangler up close: the same kind of experiment she specialized in, the kind that ended in disaster. Though at least she hadn't talked anyone into it yet. Small mercies.

The walls of the canyon widened. Hac Cúc kept her Shadow tightly around her, bracing herself for the slight push of tanglers against it. There was nothing. Not yet.

"Over there," Nhi said. Her Shadow, slow and ponderous, pushed against something, a pattern that made no sense. Bits and pieces. Where was the tangler? It was just darkness spread all around them: walls of sharp rocks on either side, with broken habitats still clinging to them—the occasional spur of rock with the cracked remains of a landing pad.

Wait.

It was a tangler. Just.

"It's massive," Hac Cúc said, forcing herself to breathe.

It was bits and pieces, waving in some invisible current, visible as Nhi's Shadow pushed against them and then moving out of sight the next moment, the very tail end of tendrils with stingers, moving in the same direction at them but with a more erratic speed.

"Most of the tanglers I've seen have been smaller," Hac Cúc said. Much, much smaller. Human-sized, and even at that size the amount of damage they did to humans was incalculable.

"It's huge," Lành said. Her voice was fearful. "Almost as large as this canyon."

Which was six measures. A thousand-and-a-half times Hac Cúc's size. "I'm not sure we can kill that," Hac Cúc said.

"That's cute," Nhi said—she was in the lead again, flying in that same slow and ponderous pattern that somehow always avoided being too close to any of the stingers. "But not the priority."

Hac Cúc saw red. "Really? We have a tangler that's growing and too large to stop, and that's not your priority? I thought you were smarter."

"Oh, I'm not that smart." Nhi didn't even sound fazed. "Two things, though. One: stopping doesn't mean killing, O Snake."

"I know that," Hac Cúc snapped. What in Heaven did Nhi hope to achieve by annoying her? "And what's two?"

"Where is Bao Duy?" Nhi asked, simply.

"She—" Hac Cúc stopped. The glider's sensors weren't showing anything. "She's not here."

"She was." Nhi's voice was sharp. "Just a moment ago."

"She has to be here." Hac Cúc pushed her glider a little further than Nhi—and felt the first bump of tendrils against her Shadow, the same feeling she'd had in the cave—something large and heavy and viscous, a touch that pressed and pressed further inwards, eating away at her Shadow.

"The tangler has her." Lành's voice was bleak.

"I'm the first to complain about undue optimism," Nhi said, "but this is really not the time to think of the worst."

Yes, because the worst was all of them dead in horrible circumstances. Hac Cúc snorted. "Dear leader—" she started, and then realized that Nhi was doing the exact thing she'd said she'd do: being horribly unpleasant to push people away in the hopes they'd leave her alone.

But they couldn't afford to be alone anymore. "You have suggestions," Hac Cúc said.

"I don't!" Nhi said. "I'm just—"

"Smart," Hac Cúc said. "Fast. Adaptable."

"None of this—"

Hac Cúc could almost feel Nhi shivering at her side, trying to get a grip on things. "Yes," she said. "It is helping. Because you know what to do."

"As if!" And a slow exhale from Nhi. "She's behind the tangler, isn't she? It's so huge it's distorting the sensors' input."

"We could go above it," Lành said. She sounded as if she was going to be sick. How long did they have before she turned tail, the same way she always did?

Nhi said, "You're not going anywhere. You're staying here."

"I told you I don't need your pity!"

Nhi's voice was dry and merciless. "I don't provide pity. I provide orders. You're staying here, and—" On the comms, a map flashed, briefly. "This is where you're deploying your barrier generators. Hac Cúc and I are going to find Bao Duy."

Hac Cúc looked at the map. Lành's barrier generators formed the first quarter of a loose sphere, at the back and towards the bottom of the tangler. She said, "You want us to go on either side, I take it. At the very edge of the tendrils. It's going to be very tight, timewise." After they finished their quarter of the sphere around the tangler, they were going to need to do the most difficult one: the one that was partly in front—wherever Bao Duy had disappeared to.

Hac Cúc tried not to worry about Bao Duy. She didn't feel Nhi's sense of responsibility towards the other members of the team, but they needed the Rat because there weren't enough of them, or enough skills among them, and Bao Duy hadn't exactly come across as someone who'd keep away from danger.

"Yes," Nhi said. Another command, one she took on faith that Hac Cúc would obey. And she knew, didn't she? She knew that Hac Cúc might hate this mission to the guts, but that, in the end, she would do everything in her power to make sure it succeeded. Because it was everything her s? ph? had taught her: do what is right, and do it right.

"Let's do this," Hac Cúc said, grimly, and pushed the nose of her glider up and to the right, just as Nhi pushed hers to the left and up, without a further word spoken. She watched Nhi on the other side—half-tempted to press herself further against the invisible tendrils to be closer to Nhi, knowing it would be utterly unreasonable to do so.

There was silence, on the comm. Lành, chastened, obviously didn't feel like talking. And Hac Cúc wanted the focus—that relentless, sharp sense of meaning it brought to everything, the feeling of being alive, of cutting through the skin of the world until it bled. They were going to try and trap the tangler, and when they had it … it was going to be over, one way or another. Her way of making a difference.

As she angled upwards, dropping barrier generators behind her, she sent short, fast bursts of Divine Harmony Shadow into the darkness to her left. She'd caught glimpses of Nhi as they went further in—and then nothing more, but the pressure she felt in answer to her own Shadow grew and grew, no longer a little nibbling at the edges of what she held, but a continuous wall that pressed against her. With each burst, she pushed it back, but it would push back in turn—and each burst drained her further, the life-energy circulating within her body's meridians being tapped further and further to keep projecting her Shadow.

That tangler was huge. It couldn't possibly be only six measures. She'd been going for so long now, and there was nothing but unrelenting pressure—that sharp, inescapable knowledge that the moment she ran out of Shadow, she'd be overwhelmed and stung, and in such a narrow space, not even Nhi could save her.

Not even Nhi. And realistically, why was she expecting anything of Nhi? They barely knew each other; she barely trusted Nhi. And yet. And yet. Somewhere in her heart of hearts was the absolute belief that, just as Nhi had expected her trust, she in turn had given hers to Nhi. It was … sobering. Wrong.

Where was Bao Duy?

Hac Cúc was alone in the darkness with just that relentless push against her Shadow, nightmare flashes in her brain of all the navigators she'd seen lost to tanglers—bumping into things, continuously forgetting what they had been doing, focusing with difficulty, struggling for speech in slurred words—and at the end, choking on their own lack of breath. She was alone, with the inescapable knowledge she wasn't Quang L?c, that she would never be Quang L?c—too abrasive, too unkind, too unskilled, with none of the gentle diplomacy and impeccable navigator arts that had brought him so much face among the clans. The tangler pressed against her again. Startled, she lost control of her Shadow and felt it cave in, the tendrils going straight to her face. In panic, she flailed, the glider starting to spin—which just made it worse, setting it on a collision course with the tangler to her right—more pressure on her disintegrating shields, her breathing becoming shorter and shorter, everything narrowing to brief, jagged moments.

The tendrils, going past her face and into the void. The glider, spinning as Hac Cúc struggled to regain control of it. Why were the commands not answering, why—? The mass to her right, crushing her. Her Shadow, slipping out of her hands, desperately trying to summon something, anything—

"Ch?." It was Nhi's voice, crackling and oddly distorted. The comms. She said something Hac Cúc couldn't hear, and then, "Remember when you told me I had this? You have, too." There was absolute certainty in her voice.

Hac Cúc wanted to scoff. What could Nhi possibly know about her, about any of her?

"Breathe," Nhi said, simply.

Breathing? As if breathing would help. She'd prove Nhi wrong. Hac Cúc breathed in, slowly. One two three four five, one two three four five … The viscous, persistent pressing on her Shadow didn't go away—but her hands, fumbling with the glider, nudged it out of its spin. The glider stabilized, shuddering. Hac Cúc put the thrusters into higher speed—she'd run out of fuel but she needed to get away, and fast. The glider trembled under her—for a single, desperate moment she saw how the future would be: the thrust not powerful enough to move away from the tangler, the inexorable collapse of her defenses, and the multitude of stings that would end her there and then. At least it would be swift, which was no comfort at all.

And then—like a knife tearing itself from flesh—the glider sped away from the huge body trying to snare her. The view in front of her opened to her Shadow; she'd moved past the tangler.

Hac Cúc breathed, fast and ragged, trying to still the frantic beating of her heart. She slowed her glider so she'd remain in front of the tangler—it was moving at about five paces per centiday, the clip of a clan ship at low speed. Her Shadow quivered and contracted, uncontrolled. She folded it. The memory of that tendril, going for her face … no. No time for this. She keyed up the positions of the barrier generators; there was a slightly larger gap where she'd lost control, but still within the parameters Bao Duy had given them.

Speaking of Bao Duy …

Hac Cúc still couldn't see her anywhere. Just the darkness of the canyon: ahead of her, it veered sharply to the left, becoming shallower and narrower, with more and more jagged outcrops. Which meant they wouldn't have as much margin to drop the barrier generators in front of the tangler. They needed to end this, and fast.

Where was Bao Duy?

"How are you?" It was Nhi. She'd come out her side, glider shining under the unwavering light of the stars. Behind her loomed the shape of the Ice Jade Planet.

"How am I? Not good," Hac Cúc said, curtly. "Can we talk about this later? We need to complete setting up the generators. And to find Bao Duy. Have you heard from Lành?" She'd been silent on the comms.

"I have," Nhi said. "About an eighth centiday ago. She was almost done. Very visibly ill at ease, but otherwise doing reasonably well."

It made Hac Cúc unbelievably, irrationally angry—how dare Lành be so brave in the face of her worst fears, when all Hac Cúc herself had managed was losing control and almost getting killed by a tangler?

"There's just this quarter of the sphere to cover now."

"Hmm," Nhi said. "Shall we split? One person for the barrier generators, one to find her."

"I thought you were in charge."

"Maybe. But you could use some control over things."

She could. Having a reassurance that some part of the universe could be, if not predictable, at least something she could act on. Something she could kill. "No," she said. "Barrier generators first." She tried to hold up a hand to forestall Nhi's objections, remembered the magnetic clamps holding her to the glider and preventing that gesture. "We need to stop it. I can't see Bao Duy. I don't know what the emergency with her is, so I have to make that choice based on what is in front of me."

Nhi was silent for a while. "Yes. I agree. Let's do this." And she angled her glider down and towards the front of the tangler. Hac Cúc took a deep breath—every nerve in her body tingled at the prospect of willingly putting herself close to the tangler again—and followed her, braced for that viscous touch on her Shadow.

They worked in silence, moving like dancers to some unheard music. The tangler was quiescent; there were no tendrils in front, but the bulk of its mass pressed against their feet and legs, a reminder of what could happen if they failed.

Hac Cúc was dropping off the third-to-last generator when Nhi said, "Here."

"What?"

It was just a glint of silver on one of the outcroppings, ahead to the right—by the side of an abandoned dome in a horizontal position. It had long since cracked open. "You can't know—" Hac Cúc said.

"It's the exact color of our suits," Nhi said, in a tone that brooked no argument. A hesitation. "There's just two generators left, one for each of us. Can you—"

Hac Cúc fought the entirely unfair panic at the prospect of being left alone with the tangler again. "Yes," she said. "I can drop yours off, too. Why don't you pass it to me?"

Nhi glided closer—close enough to touch. Her generator attached itself to Hac Cúc's glider—and then she did reach out, one gloved hand gently lingering on Hac Cúc's arm. Hac Cúc found her breath catching in her chest.

"Ancestors' luck be with you," Nhi said, and Hac Cúc found herself at a complete loss for words as Nhi left.

"You too!" she said finally, even though Nhi was by now a smaller shape accelerating towards the outcropping. She'd done something to her Shadow, something that made her smaller and less visible, the same kind of thing she did to her body posture when she was nervous, fading into the background when she should have been gloriously there.

"Always," Nhi said, and Hac Cúc didn't need to see her to imagine the smile on her face. It did odd things to her chest, twisting some organs whose existence she'd been barely aware of before.

This woman. This impossible, infuriating woman. Hac Cúc felt herself smiling again as she dropped off the two barrier generators, and they locked onto the tangler. Done.

Nothing happened.

"Em?" she said.

"I'm a bit busy," Nhi said. "Can't really navigate those rocks and talk to you."

"It doesn't seem to be working." Hac Cúc fought the panic in her throat. "You did drop your generators?"

A silence.

"Of course I did."

Lành. She ought to have known she couldn't trust Lành. "Em," she said to Lành on the comms. "Em, please come in."

"I see her," Nhi said. Her voice came in distantly, and clearly worried. "Bao Duy. She's been stung, and she's under some kind of rock fall. I need to get her clear."

Not good. Not good.

Breathe. She could deal with that kind of emergency. She needed to, no matter how dire it seemed. "You get her out," she said to Nhi. "I'm going to locate Lành."

"Yes," Nhi said. And, with that faint touch of amusement to her voice, "Please try to keep Lành alive, if you can."

If she could. Hac Cúc turned around, and plunged under the tangler.

It was, like them on their gliders, mostly horizontal in the direction of its flight, the umbrella in front with most of its tendrils trailing behind it. Beneath it, there was just the pressure on her Shadow—and an absolute and total lack of barrier generators in what should have been the last quarter of the sphere.

"Em," she said to Lành again. "Come in."

How had she been so lacking in common sense, how had she been so trusting? She ought to have known she couldn't trust Lành. That, at heart, Lành was just this broken child her s? ph? had taken pity on, but that ultimately the flaw at her heart would always surface, always betray her and everyone with her.

"Em!"

Naive, naive, naive. She ought to have known better, but for a moment she'd allowed herself to believe the same way Nhi had believed—Nhi, who knew too much and still chose to trust, or at any rate to work with what she had.

"Em!"

Hac Cúc sent a burst of Shadow angling towards the back of the tangler—for a moment, she saw it clearly: the massiveness of it, the impossibly large pulsing mass with tendrils spreading, forming an impassable corona at the back, a glistening net that would snare her and never let go …

Focus. Focus.

There was a smaller mass ahead of the corona, a little knot of tendrils tightly wrapped around something.

Her heart sank.

"Em," she said, not believing Lành was going to come in anymore.

As Hac Cúc cautiously angled closer, she saw that it was indeed Lành. She was hanging from her immobile glider, and yet she was moving, her body horizontal with the momentum. Hac Cúc couldn't see her face with the suit's visor on, but the whole pose felt off—it wasn't just the muscle relaxation, but something that felt to Hac Cúc almost like ecstasy, the way some bodhisattva were depicted in temples. Something that definitely had no place here, in the midst of a tangler's corona. Hac Cúc sent another burst of Shadow, heedless of the way it made her whole body shudder with fatigue, and saw that the tendrils were parting around Lành, forming a loose cage. So, not stung. Or maybe already stung and being dragged into the umbrella to be digested? But no, she didn't seem to be moving further into the tangler. She was just hanging there, keeping pace with it.

And if that wasn't the most absolutely disturbing and creepy thing.

"Wake up," Hac Cúc said. "Wake up!!"

She'd managed to drop barrier generators before being caught; there was just one missing, and Hac Cúc—like everyone else—had had spare ones for redundancy. She could easily drop it into place. Well, not easily, necessarily, but it could be done. The issue was that if she did that, she'd trap Lành in with the tangler.

She considered it, briefly. It was certainly expedient. Pragmatic, compared to the option of failure. And Snakes had always been the pragmatic, expedient ones. She'd ask herself what Quang L?c would do, but he would advise her to be merciful, to stand up for Lành as he'd done. To forgive her.

She stared at Lành, trailing within the tangler. She hated Lành's guts, but there was a difference between that and leaving her to die. Hac Cúc lived by a code, which wasn't the Snakes': she knew what mattered was protecting those who couldn't protect themselves. And failing at the mission—as she'd always known Lành would do—wasn't the same thing as being guilty of anything. If being cowardly or having no principles was a criteria on which to assassinate people, Hac Cúc would have killed half of humanity already.

She fiddled with the barrier generator. By her calculations, she had about two-eighths of a centiday—so a quarter centiday—before the barrier generators lost the lock on the tangler. It was going to be difficult. Very difficult.

"How are you doing?" she asked Nhi.

A grunt, from the comms. "Can't. Talk. Now."

Right. So it was just her, then.

Nhi's voice, in her head. You can do it.

Of course she could, or at the very least she could prove Nhi wrong.

She set her comms to send a high-pitched, unpleasant sound calibrated to keep people from sleeping. Not that she thought it would get Lành back from wherever Lành was, but it might prevent her from being snared again.

Then she set her glider to dive, and gathered her Shadow to her, concentrating the gathered energy into a focused, lethal burst that she usually used to push off assailants and finish them off. As she got closer and closer to the tangler, she felt the push of it. The slimy feeling of something that was going to shatter her—except it was oddly muted, because these tendrils were centered on Lành and not her.

And wasn't that a thing she absolutely refused to think about until everyone was safe.

As she got closer—close enough to touch, close enough to be stung—Hac Cúc sent her burst into the mass of tendrils. It left her with the feeling of something tearing inside her—and the tendrils recoiled as if she'd hurt them. In the brief moment when she could still see them, in the sharpened contrast that came in the wake of her Shadow, Hac Cúc swooped down, and grabbed Lành—and veered away sharply once more, away from the tendrils. She unfolded her Shadow again as she did so, and it was all pressure now, all mindless will to take her and crush her—and she wasn't going to make it, she was going to have to let go of her Shadow, they would both die here, now …

Then she was clear, Lành still limp behind her, trailing on the momentum of Hac Cúc's glider. Hac Cúc wanted to shake her, but now wasn't the time. Now, she needed to make sure the tangler was trapped, or her stunt would all have been for nothing.

At her back, the pressure on her Shadow—now deployed to protect Lành—increased. There was a sound, overlaying and merging with the one she'd put on to wake Lành up—some kind of primal and unpleasant scream, like fear, like rage, like pain. Lành shuddered and moved.

"What—what's going on?" Her voice was heavy with something Hac Cúc couldn't quite name.

"Not now," Hac Cúc said. She was steering, racing towards that last hole in the sphere of barrier generators, even as the pressure on them increased. She held on, grimly, shaking. One measure left. Half a measure. A quarter. She could barely see, everything was narrowing and turning black. Too much drawing on reserves she no longer had. She—

There.

She dropped off the last of the barrier generators. There was an audible click on her comms—a held, shaking breath when she feared they'd missed the deadline—but then they all activated at once, forming a sphere of shimmering light. The pressure on her Shadow vanished as if it had never been; the shock of it almost sent her tumbling away from her glider, which would have been bad as she had no personal thrusters and no way to recover in the vacuum of space.

"I've got Lành," she said to Nhi on the comms.

"And the tangler, I see," Nhi said. "I've got Bao Duy, but she's unconscious. Well done. Now we need to kill—"

Hac Cúc cut her off before she could speak further. "That requires knowledge from one unconscious Rat. Or more people who aren't utterly exhausted. We're leaving it here and calling in the elders. They'll deal with it."

"Can you turn off that irritating noise?" Lành asked, sharply. She was awake and being utterly unpleasant. Well, the usual, then.

Hac Cúc smiled. "As you wish," she said, tempted for half a moment to turn it all the way up. But she cut it, and turned the glider around, ready to fly back to the shuttle. As she did so, she saw all of the tangler, twisting and turning in the sphere that now kept it imprisoned: a huge mass of darker lights against the light of the barrier, tendrils weaving in slow and utterly alien movements. And she knew, instinctively, that it wasn't going to be over until it was dead, except they had no means and few ideas on how to kill it.