8. Worth

Hac Cúc didn't go far after leaving Nhi. Only to her own quarters, where she tried, with shaking hands, to brew some tea—the lines from the energy-fount didn't seem to connect, in spite of her sending the proper commands. She kept seeing Nhi's face—frowning, disapproving.

Everything she'd thought she knew was in shambles, and in the midst of that, all Nhi could think of was goading her to be worthy of her su phu.

Worthy of whom?

She would never be worthy, because there was nothing to be worthy of.

Why had Hac thought Nhi and she had an understanding? There was nothing there, more of the same drive her former girlfriend had had—being attracted to something Hac Cúc would never be. The same judgment, and ultimately, it would be the same disappointment—and Nhi would walk away.

No, better to walk away before she was the one who got hurt.

And it had been close, hadn't it.

Because Nhi saying "I love you," for a brief moment, had felt like everything she wanted to hear, water to a parched throat, rice to a stomach stretched with hunger. In a brief moment before it all stung and she remembered what had happened. So she'd lashed out and run.

I love you.

I can't. I can't return that.

And the worst was, it still hurt.

But that was who she was, wasn't it? Unkind. Cruel.

Alone.

Hac Cúc, listless, annoyed at herself, wandered down into the common area of the inn, where she found Bao Duy playing a solitary game with an encirclement chessboard and some complex rules. Lành was nearby, on one of the couches, doing some Shadow exercises: the lines from the energy-fount lit up the entire couch, so that she seemed to be floating in a sea of light. She raised her gaze when Hac Cúc came in, briefly nodded at her, and then went back to what she was doing. Bao Duy wouldn't meet her gaze.

Hac Cúc sat down at the other end of the couch, and stared at the light. It shifted from the blue of the energy-fount to a deeper, darker color reminiscent of the Hollows.

He's an old man whose time has come and gone.

I'm just a man. Perhaps once, my cultivation of Shadow was unnaturally good.

At least Quang Loc was smart.

Bao Duy said, softly, "I feel like we're just killing time until our execution."

A snort, from Lành. "Not ours. We're not the ones who are going to get stung. It'll be the civilians downworld."

"A tangler that size, they won't get stung," Bao Duy said. "I mean, they will, but it'll progress to death pretty instantly. And it's not going to leave whichever habitat it's devastating. Too much food."

"Thank you for this totally unnecessary and detailed graphic description," Lành said. "It's bad enough sitting here, I didn't need the mental images."

"Perhaps it's what we deserve," Bao Duy said, uncannily echoing Hac Cúc's own thoughts.

"For standing aside?" Lành snorted. "What else can we do?"

Hac Cúc couldn't help it. She said, "Nhi hasn't stood aside."

"Nhi," Lành said, barely looking up from her Shadow exercises, "is weird."

She was not! But Hac Cúc had been cruel enough, and she wasn't going to pick another fight with Lành. That wasn't who she wanted to be.

"Nhi prefers to be by herself," she said. She held onto the secret Nhi had told her, the one about needing to be alone lest something bad happen—that deep-seated fear of collapse that Nhi always carried with her. Instead, she said, "Because she doesn't always understand other people."

Her gut twisted as she said it. Nhi had said and implied as much, hadn't she? And … and she'd tried to comfort Hac Cúc, in exactly the wrong way. Because she'd misjudged. That was the terrible thing Nhi was afraid of.

And Hac Cúc—

No, it changed nothing. Nhi was expecting her to be like her su phu, or the ideal image she had of her su phu, which was worse. She couldn't be those things. Any of those things.

Bao Duy moved a pawn on the board and sighed. "We're all weird. That's the reason the elders sent us in the first place. Because they knew we were going to fail."

But they hadn't, had they? In spite of everything that should have doomed them to failure—Lành's bitterness, Bao Duy's tendency to go off by herself, Hac Cúc's cruelty and contempt, Nhi's fundamental desire to be alone—they had worked together. They had caught a tangler.

Hac Cúc remembered what Nhi had told her. Nothing they said in this room was right.

Oh, Ancestors.

"We didn't fail," she said, slowly, carefully. Lành looked up. She looked at Hac Cúc with something like simmering resentment, and no wonder. "We stumbled, but we didn't fail."

"You mean, like what we're doing now?" Lành asked.

Hac Cúc held up a hand, calling up Shadow. Its feeling— a warmth in her gut, spreading to her arms and then to the outside air—pierced the bubble of doom she'd been wrapping around herself. "Yes," she said. "Because we're choosing to fail."

"You sound like Nhi," Bao Duy said.

And was that such a bad thing?

She was choosing to be cruel. To lash out. To make herself alone. Just as Quang Loc was choosing to stand aside.

It was a choice, and she could make a different one.

She said, to Lành, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have hurt you."

Lành stared at Hac Cúc as if she'd just drawn down the moon in her lap. "You think that's going to make everything better?"

"No," Hac Cúc said. "But I was scared and I lashed out, and that's not who I want to be." She stared at Lành—survivor of a tangler attack, deathly scared of anything and everything that would put her in contact with them, and yet who had still chosen to help. "And everything has to start somewhere."

Lành stared at her, again. Then she folded her Shadow and said, "I'll accept the apology, but don't think it makes us friends."

"Fair," Hac Cúc said. She said, "I want to go to Nhi. I want to stand with her and stop that tangler. Will you help me?" The pronoun she used was plural.

Lành glowered again. "Picking up your girlfriend? I'm not going along."

"But you agree that what the elders are doing is wrong," Hac Cúc said.

Bao Duy began, "They said—"

"I know what they said. They chose the most hurtful thing, and they drove it into our chests." And it had hurt. It had hurt. But now her head was clear, and she saw it exactly for what it was: a dividing tactic. "There is no moral equivalency between your running out on us and the elders choosing to unleash a tangler on a habitat." She saw it then, clearly. "Not a habitat. They'll unleash it on the Dog Needle. Because that will do the most damage."

Bao Duy stared at her. She looked sick. Finally she said, "Admit I agree with you. How are you planning to stop that tangler?"

"You said you could kill it."

"Yes," Bao Duy said. She stared, hard, at the remnants of her game, glimmering in the light. "That was before I saw it, and now that I've seen it, I think it's a miracle the barrier generators can hold it. And it's not going to just go back to the Hollows."

Unbidden, a memory rose in Hac Cúc's mind. Lành, telling her about the tangler. "Lành?"

"I have a feeling I'm not going to like whatever you're about to say," Lành said. "But I'll listen. Once."

"You said it talked to you."

Lành hissed, as if bitten. "Yes, it did. What of it?"

Hac Cúc was very careful to keep her voice expressionless. "You said it was miserable outside of the Hollows. You could talk to it. And we could open a navigation gate."

A silence.

Bao Duy said, "We don't open navigation gates trivially. Because of the risk of tanglers."

Hac Cúc snorted. "I think that it's too late to worry about that, don't you agree?"

Lành said, "Just to be clear. You're suggesting that I go talk to the stuff of my worst nightmares and try to convince it to go back to the Hollows?"

Hac Cúc said nothing.

It was Bao Duy who spoke up, slowly, carefully. "It does make sense."

"All right," Lành said. "Assume it works. Assume we're not stung. Assume we're not dead. How do you prevent the elders from doing the same thing all over again? Let a tangler loose, let it kill Dogs and civilians, use the outcry to sway things in favor of the clans."

"I don't have an answer," Hac Cúc said. "But this isn't about preventing everything. This is about this one thing that we can affect."

A hard stare, from Lành. "Everything has to start somewhere?"

Hac Cúc swallowed. It still hurt. No magical effect there: Lành could still effortlessly annoy and wound her. But she thought she could understand some of what Lành was doing, and why. She said, finally, "I know you're scared."

"Yes!" Lành said. "Of course I'm scared! You realize what it is you're proposing?"

"Yes," Hac Cúc said, slowly and softly. And then, equally softly: "It's my ship we'd be using for opening the gate. I'll be piloting it. I know exactly the kind of risk I'm asking you to take, because I'll be taking the same one."

Lành closed her eyes. "I don't understand you," she said. "Why do you think you can suddenly trust me to be anything but who I've always been?"

"That's all you can expect of anyone. And who you are is someone who was scared and still went to place the barrier generators around the tangler."

Lành glared. "You mistake me," she said.

"Do I?" Hac Cúc held her gaze. It was Lành who looked away, and who said nothing.

Bao Duy put the final pawn in place and swept the board clean with her hands. The pawns clattered on the floor, one by one—a sound like raindrops on metal. "You're going to need someone to keep an eye on the tangler's behavior while you do this. I can do that. Let's go find Nhi."

"I haven't said yes," Lành said, sharply.

"You haven't?" Bao Duy shrugged. "What's your answer, then?"

For a long while—ten thousand thousands of years in some court of Hell—nothing happened. Then Lành said, reluctantly, "You understand this is never going to work. But I'm never going to forgive myself if I don't at least try, so I guess that's us, then."

Insofar as battle cries went, this was far from the enthusiasm she'd seen in vids and stories, but Hac Cúc would take it.

"Let's go," she said.

Nhi's room was empty.

Oh no.

Hac Cúc knew exactly why it would be empty, and this was bad, bad news. "She's gone on her own," she said, her stomach twisting.

Lành—whom she'd sent ahead to check if the exits were clear—pinged her from the comms. "Yeah, I know. There's a certain amount of commotion here. Juniors are rushing out, and there's obviously been some kind of a fight near the door."

No no no no. Things had just gone from terrifyingly bad to worse. "Can we sneak out?"

"If you come down right away," Lành said. "It's sheer chaos, I presume because they're trying to catch up to Nhi, but very soon they're going to figure out this specific set of juniors shouldn't be among the people rushing out."

Oh, Nhi. That stubborn, principled, impossible woman—had chosen to head out on her own to try and stop a tangler that couldn't be stopped.

Hac Cúc felt fear—that very deep-seated terror—that Nhi might be dead before they could get to her.

And there was guilt, too: Hac Cúc had lashed out at her, and that had been the determining factor in Nhi's isolation. She shouldn't have done that, and yet it might be too late to call it back. Too late to tell Nhi that she did love her, that she did matter. That she did understand.

Hac Cúc sent up a prayer to ancestors whose effectiveness she wasn't entirely sure of, and hurried down to meet Lành.

Em. Hang on. Please. Hang on.

We're coming.

Nhi was halfway to the Dog Needle when her brain caught up with her. She'd gotten a shuttle with little effort—looking over her shoulder the entire way—and she'd piloted it in her slow, ponderous way, drawing on just enough Shadow to have an idea of where the tangler was without breaking the shuttle. But, as she neared the Dog Needle, the trail of the tangler bumped into her Shadow—and she felt it become denser and denser, a viscous mass that didn't care much for her existence or her desperate and futile attempts to stop it.

It felt bigger, larger than when she'd first seen it. Had whatever happened with Lành made it larger? Or had the clans fed it before releasing it?

The thought was like a sharp prickle that she couldn't get rid of. She was a junior without permission to have her own ship—she'd only piloted Rooster clan ships on her rare outings. She hadn't expected much of life—not even a rise to full-blown navigator. But she'd believed, in spite of all available evidence, that navigators were decent.

That belief had obviously been mistaken, and now she was having to reassess rather a lot of things about her life. Or whatever was left of it.

Nhi didn't see any of the clan navigators. Presumably they'd left after doing the deed. Wait.

She turned, staring at her sensors. Yes, there were dots that didn't quite rise above the threshold for full-blown detection. Far too many ships and far too organized. The navigators were behind her. Either the ones who'd driven the tangler there or the ones Elder Lieu had sent after her.

Either way, she wasn't alone.

Ahead was the Dog Needle: this far away, it was just a sliver of steel, glinting against the blue-grey layer of clouds that covered the Ice Jade Planet. Behind her, somewhere barely visible, was the Silver Stream, the Fragments of the broken moon. Nhi had barrier generators in her hold, and not much else. She was too far away from either to expect anything—and in any case, who would stand with her?

In the end, she'd always known that she'd be alone because the secrets she held had driven everybody else away.

Well, there was nothing for it.

Nhi put the shuttle on a straight course for the Dog Needle, and descended into the hold to find a suit and a glider.

The upper atmosphere wasn't quite like the Old Rise, and neither suit nor glider had been meant for it. Nhi could feel the friction that was slowing down the glider, and despite the suit, she was feeling frozen to the bones: the wind was getting into it. She sent a burst of Shadow onwards—and in the brief layer of darkness it created, she saw the outline of so many tendrils.

It was huge.

Breathe. Breathe. She set her suit to muffle outside sounds—it wouldn't do to have a crisis due to oversensitivity.

She couldn't kill it or trap the tangler, but maybe, maybe, she could divert it from the Dog Needle, and make it head towards somewhere where it'd be less likely to do any damage.

Nhi deliberately didn't think about what was going to happen next, because diverting the tangler was only postponing the problem. She needed to be doing something, anything.

She dived to the side, raising Shadow around her.

She almost immediately felt the stingers, and they weren't randomly moving. The tangler was aware of her, and it was moving to—assimilate her? Sting her? Eat her? She wasn't quite sure. She hardened her Shadow against the pressing onslaught of viscousness.

On her comms, a ping, then another. "This is the Rooster clan. Stand down! We'll come to retrieve you."

And another familiar voice: Elder Lieu's, pleading. "Nhi, please. Don't make this any harder on yourself."

Alone.

Forever alone.

It was a choice of the tangler and her ideals, or admitting defeat and going back to the clans—and there was no question as to what her answer would be. Nhi clamped herself as tight as she could to the glider, and accelerated, straight towards the mass of tendrils.

They wrapped around her, as if they were a second shield to match the one she was already raising—except she felt the pressure of the stingers, the viscousness, as if algae were trailing again and again against her Shadow, chipping away bits and pieces of it in the process. Her chest burnt, and she was already shaking with the effort of holding against the tangler.

Nhi took a deep breath, and steeled herself for the end.