The Mausoleum's Children - Uncanny Magazine (original) (raw)

Thuận Lộc stared at the cup.

It was dark, and mottled with the characteristic patterning of silver-eye fungus. The tea inside was trembling—the faint vibrations from the Mausoleum, the dead ships’ atrophied motors that would never again allow them to hang, weightless, among the stars. Even now—even standing far away from it in that small shed made of scrap metal and recycled filters—even now, that place could still reach her.

A fitting reminder of her life so far, she supposed.

Thuận Lộc rubbed her chest, feeling the vibrations there too—a phantom pain, a memory of wounds that should have hurt, and didn’t. A harpoon, its blade iced light drawn from the motor of a dead ship—driven into her chest by the Hunt as she fled the Mausoleum.

Silver-eye. A tea for resilience, for stability of the khí-flows within the body. Not for sneaking back; not for outrunning the Hunt a second time. Not for saving those left behind.

“That’s not what I asked for,” she said.

Laughter, from An Nhiên. “No,” she said. “But you seldom get what you ask for, do you?” The older woman’s skin was still smooth, but her time away from the Mausoleum and its rejuv-tanks had scattered grey into her hair, and drawn faint lines—like cracked celadon—on her cheeks.

“Is this some kind of test?”

An Nhiên looked at Thuận Lộc for a while, and then away, towards the cup that lay between them. “The Hunt grows restless again,” she said. “It’s too risky to go and scavenge in the outskirts.”

The Hunt would go out, on nights where the moon lay dead in the sky: the sleek metal shapes of small, living gliders, driven by algorithms and some old, atavistic instinct to chase those who ran; to scour the cratered, dusty land clear. The Architects might have failed to rebuild even the smallest part of the dead ships, but in these spiteful, malicious creations descended from ship technology they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

“Resilience.” Thuận Lộc raised the cup to her lips, feeling it burn as it descended down her throat. “Any advice?”

A sigh, from An Nhiên. “Don’t get caught,” she said.

Thuận Lộc laughed. A warm, fuzzy feeling was spreading from her stomach to her arms, making every emotion feel distant and dampened. She ran a hand on her scar in her chest, the one not even the rejuv-tanks could erase. “I survived it once, didn’t I?” she asked, with a lightness she didn’t feel.

An eloquent grimace from An Nhiên. She’d been the one to patch Thuận Lộc, back then. “You won’t survive it a second time,” she said. “And you know they’re waiting for you.”

Were they? Nai, Dao. She’d left them behind. Thuận Lộc wasn’t even sure if they’d survived, if they were still toiling in the depths of the ships’ corpses, trying to repair the damages of immemorial wars. Or if, like her, they’d tried to run—and unlike her, become corpses transfixed by the throwing of a blade, the shot from an ion-gun. “You can’t promise me that.”

“No.” An Nhiên was silent, for a while. “You could give up. You were a child when you left. You didn’t leave them behind. You did what you had to do to survive.”

Thuận Lộc had thought about it for a long time. She’d run, as a child, and her friends had been too scared, too beaten down to follow her. She didn’t blame herself, not exactly; not for being free when others weren’t.

But in reality, she was still running. In her life and in her dreams, always seeing the looming shape of the Mausoleum—the dozens of dead ships melted into one another by a conflagration so old not even the Architects knew its nature. She’d been to so many planets—watching people on the concourses, in the shops, laughing, nudging each other, hugging, kissing, asking how she’d been, and every time she spoke the truth—that she’d been terrible, skittish, moodily aggressive, that she was still seeing the Hunt in her dreams, hearing that high-pitched whine getting closer and closer to her—that, in some of the most terrible dreams, she became the Hunt, transfigured into a glider by the Architects’ arcane skills. Every time, people would wince, and speak only platitudes—words that didn’t touch her, that made nothing better.

She’d had a string of jobs that all wanted more than she was able to give—where fatigue and nightmares would finally get the better of her. They’d send her to counselling first; and then, when that failed to work—when nothing touched the hollow at her core, the place the Hunt’s harpoon had pierced—would regretfully tell her she needed to look elsewhere to earn a living.

She said, finally, “I did what I had to do. And now I’m doing what I have to do, too. Because I’m not a child anymore. Because I can help them now.”

Something like pity, in An Nhiên’s eyes. How dare she judge? Thuận Lộc’s anger was swiftly extinguished, partly by the tea, partly by sobering awareness of their situation. An Nhiên had walked away from the Mausoleum as an adult, from being an Architect—except she hadn’t gotten that far.

Thuận Lộc guessed none of them had.

There weren’t many guards, on the outskirts. Why would there be? The Hunt was there, if necessary. It was tempting to just walk through, head held high—brash and angry, burning with the fire of heavenly justice.

Tempting, but hardly prudent.

So, instead, Thuận Lộc hid. Behind ruined walls, into craters—making her slow, tense way to the heart of the Mausoleum. Debris became fragments of walls; fragments became whole; and gradually the whole edifice grew to swallow her—the transition from scattered fragments to a maze of darkened corridors, from the dust of outside to metal floors. And, gradually, the noise grew. It started out faint, but then it became a hum, and then the hum was resonating in her whole chest, buzzing alongside her own heartbeat until she became wholly confused about which organs were in her chest. She laid a hand on the walls around her—felt them thrum and pulse, and that pulse was also in her body. It was…dizzying, unpleasant. She hadn’t felt that way since she was a child.

At the next intersection, there were children: a girl labouring to clean debris from the corridors, and another with thin wires sprouting from the back of her hands and going into the walls. The girl with the wires was chanting, the slow, rhythmic words sending chills up Thuận Lộc’s spine. She’d been the one there, trying to find something beyond the ships’ thrum of motors—sending signals from the meridians of her body into that darkness, and getting in return those wordless, unpredictable jolts that would travel up her arms, making her chest feel twisted out of shape and her entire self as dizzy as if she’d been spinning for hours on end.

Thuận Lộc didn’t move fast enough: the child who was moving rocks—who couldn’t have been older than six or seven—saw her. She froze, for a moment—and then fear was replaced by unease as the girl threw herself on the floor.

Oh. Oh. Through the morass of emotions slowed down by the tea, Thuận Lộc realised it was her clothes: she’d chosen them carefully to mimic an Architect’s, and of course these would expect utter servility from the young.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time; and now she saw why An Nhiên had given her the tea: because there was no way she was going to remain detached enough, no way she wasn’t going to try and rescue all of these children even though she couldn’t even be sure of her capacity to even save herself. She said, slowly and carefully, “I’m looking for people. Dao and Nai.” These were children’s names, or intimates’ names, but she didn’t remember the fuller names of her friends. So much time had passed.

The children looked at each other. At length, the child who was wired into the metal walls detached herself from them, wires dangling from her hands—glistening with some darkened fluid that smelled of rust and rot. They were swiftly reabsorbed into the flesh of her hands. Thuận Lộc’s own hands itched. She still had the same ports: she’d had the wires cleaned, but not removed. Somehow she never got around to it. Somehow it always ended up feeling like too many memories, too much churning of fear and dizziness in her gut—somehow it all felt like a betrayal of who she was and where she’d come from.

“I’m Công,” the child said. And then gestured for Thuận Lộc to follow her. Thuận Lộc threw a glance behind her as they left: the other girl was now moving towards the wall, thoughtfully staring at it before laying both her hands on them.

“She’ll finish up,” Công said. And, with a hint of tight, controlled feeling Thuận Lộc knew all too well, “So we can show our results to the Architects.”

Thuận Lộc couldn’t help herself. “How goes it?” she asked.

A frown, from Công. “I heard something,” she said. “Beyond the motors.” Her gaze was distant. “The kind of noise that chases you in your sleep. It’s hard to stop unhearing it.”

Thuận Lộc remembered that noise. The way it sounded, not quite like a noise, but the attention of something great and terrible. The memory of it sometimes woke her up—but not as often as the memories of the Hunt.

“It sounds like you’re succeeding,” Thuận Lộc said. The Architects wanted to wake the ships up, to enlist them into the empire’s wars; and in the meantime they would scavenge technology from the wreck and repurpose it—like the Hunt.

“Mm,” Công said. “The Architects can’t hear it anymore. I think it’s because they’re old. It likes children best.”

Thuận Lộc wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, because Công sounded scared and proud, and Thuận Lộc just felt scared for her, because she remembered exactly what it had been like when she’d been Công’s age, that longing to satisfy adults and that deep-seated unease that they were only valued and loved when they did. And now she was older, there was also a distant rage—that it was children doing this kind of work; but of course the adults were forced into a different kind of servility.

The corridors became larger; the air tinged with a particular, sharp smell. Even with the tea, Thuận Lộc felt she was thrown fifteen years back—except everything was much smaller than it had been, back then, and even the distances felt out and out of joint.

There were other children; and a few adults avoiding her gaze, bending back to their tasks of welding metal back together, of carving sigils into walls and floors, of pushing floating carts with arcane equipment on them. Through it all, Thuận Lộc forced herself to move; to pretend to know what was going on—to ignore the way her presence changed things, the tension as people turned to what they were doing a little too intently, the children bowing like plants in some solar wind.

At length, they reached a section of the Mausoleum that was almost empty; and here Công pointed to the end of a corridor which flared into what must have been a large hangar once—except that too many other rooms had melted into it, and it was now filled with various extruded surfaces, a flowing mass of walls flowing into spiked shapes.

“Here,” she said. The thrum of motors was now an unbearable vibration that felt as though it was going to tear Thuận Lộc apart.

“There’s nothing—” Thuận Lộc said, and then someone spoke from the darkness.

“Big’sis?” It was Nai’s voice—surprised and relieved.

Relief, too, flooded Thuận Lộc, strong enough not even the tea could keep it at bay. “I came back,” she said. “Where’s Dao? We can leave—”

Too late, she remembered Công. She turned, to find the child staring at her with preternaturally large eyes—something a little too much like awe. “You’re—” Công said.

“I’m not an Architect,” Thuận Lộc said. The motors’ noise made it hard to focus, or perhaps it was the tea. Or being back.

Công hadn’t moved. She seemed like she was chewing on something. The rational thing to do would have been to silence her, so she couldn’t raise the alarm. It didn’t have to be fatal: merely overpower her, knock her unconscious. But the thought of hurting a child—even for a good cause—made Thuận Lộc nauseous.

“Please,” she said, instead. “Stay here.”

Công stared at her. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness. At length, she nodded. Thuận Lộc felt a weight lift from her shoulders.

Ridiculous, An Nhiên would have said. You’re going into the belly of the beast, and your first thought is sparing people? You’re too weak.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Nai said. She emerged from the darkness—emaciated, in the grey robes of an ordinary worker, with a faint acridity clinging to her. She wouldn’t meet Thuận Lộc’s gaze, and Thuận Lộc had been wrong. She didn’t sound relieved. More like uncomfortable, scared.

“No,” she said, slowly, carefully. “I can see you didn’t.”

“I saw you die,” Nai said. She stared into the empty hangar. Something clinked, as she straightened up—some discarded tool or piece of metal. “I knew you hadn’t. And I hoped you had the good sense to forget this place.”

“I can’t,” Thuận Lộc said, and it was the simplest, barest truth.

Bitter laughter, from Nai. They hadn’t been happy, as children, but this—this woman with the hollow eyes and the hollow voice—was something else. Something from Thuận Lộc’s worst nightmares.

“Come with me,” Thuận Lộc said. “Please.” The effects of the tea An Nhiên had given her were fading: she could feel her fear, her panic rising—everything she’d unsuccessfully tried to keep at bay.

Nai didn’t move for a while. She said, cocking her head. “What’s out there, Thuận Lộc?”

“Everything!” Not dead ships. Not Architects trying to rebuild them, not people imprisoned, not children used for the smallest of the work, so they could grow into more skilled workers. “There are—” she made a gesture with her hands. “Planets. Concourses with noodle soup. People choosing what they want to do. People laughing. There’s—” she paused, then. “There’s no Hunt. No guards.”

A pinch of lips, from Nai. “And yet.”

“And yet what?” Why couldn’t she see it?

“And yet you never left.”

“Of course I did!”

“Laughter. How many times have you laughed, lately?”

Thuận Lộc stared at Nai. “Are you seriously trying to tell me it’s better here?”

A tug, on her sleeve. She looked down at Công—who lifted a hand, wires poking from her palm. “You need to leave,” Công said. “Architects will be here soon. The real ones.” There was fear in her voice.

Thuận Lộc couldn’t leave. So much risk, so much planning, so much longing. She’d put too much of herself into this. “Please,” she said to Nai. “Come.”

Nai stared at Thuận Lộc, for a while. “Convince me,” she said.

“It’s not a game!”

“No.” There was fear in Nai’s voice. “We’ll have to brave the Hunt again. You know this. I know this. What’s worth doing this? Why does outside have that’s so attractive? At least here we’re safe.”

“Here? Where they work you to the bone?”

“It’s no different elsewhere, is it?”

Thuận Lộc opened her mouth, closed it. She thought of the string of jobs she’d had since leaving the Mausoleum; of the constant, bone-deep fatigue. “You’ll be free outside.”

“Free to starve,” Nai said.

“That’s not—” She sounded so utterly certain: voice level, gaze turned away from Thuận Lộc, not a hint of quiver or hesitation. Thuận Lộc suddenly couldn’t remember any arguments she might have had. Why would anyone choose to stay?

Why hadn’t she thought this through? Why hadn’t she taken this into account in her preparations? A whole lifetime’s worth of nightmares and she couldn’t even be bothered to see the consequences of Nai’s growing up in the Mausoleum.

Another tug. It was Công again. Beneath her skin, the circuits and ports anchoring the wires were shining silver. “They’re coming,” she said.

The air was as tight as the skin of a drum, charged with that particular smell like burning ozone—like charred skin, that time in long-ago memory when Linh had made a mistake trying to plug in to the walls and her hands had burnt—not with fire, but with a covert heat that had blackened the skin outwards from the ports.

They’re coming.

The Architects.

The Hunt.

“Please,” Thuận Lộc said. Pleading. Begging, a fist of ice closing around her innards at the thought of having to give up. At the thought of having failed at this as she’d failed at everything else.

Nai shook her head, and turned back to whatever she’d been doing in the darkness—back to the molten shape of the hangar and everything else inside. “I don’t think so. Now go, Lộc.”

“But—”

“Go!”

Công was tugging at her hand, dragging her. And it was rising, twisting in the air—that feeling of dread, that high-pitched whine, the walls around her feeling like they were going to entomb her the same way they’d entombed everyone else.

Go.

She walked. She forced herself to. To run would have attracted attention. Công had started ahead of her; but as they went further and further, memories came flowing back—turns and twists of the cavernous corridors; of the broken walls and burst-open cabins. The ships’ motors, thrumming in her own veins, in her own bones, in her own body until she forgot the boundaries of her own self. And, through it all, a distant, growing sense of that same terrible attention, the one that had followed her as a child—an unsettling echo that wouldn’t quite let go, that followed her in dreams.

Thuận Lộc was ahead of Công now—there would be the cabins here, a long corridor that turned into the corridor of another ship—visible through the different markings, the alien alphabet on the walls, its letters misshapen and distorted and running into each other in the heart of that long-ago conflagration. And here, the remnants of a control room—the consoles fused into the smaller ships held in one of the hangars from another ship, the command deck flowing into the beds from the cabins—and into some other, unidentifiable pieces of furniture Architect Việt Quốc had always been convinced were the remnant of hydroponic farms…

And then more corridors, more darkened hallways that were more unfamiliar: equipment that couldn’t quite be identified fused to walls and the melted curves of hulls; fragments of huge rotors stabbed into a floor that had heaved and bucked and frozen in that odd shape…

The people toiling to repair these places didn’t even look twice at her: she looked as though she belonged in a profound and fundamental way.

As if she’d never left.

It was that shock that stopped her—and Công’s pale, scared face as the girl looked up at her. “Where are we?” Thuận Lộc asked.

“I don’t know,” Công said. It was quiet; and the look she was flashing at Thuận Lộc made her ill at ease, because she knew that look. The look one gave an Architect—who could send people into the darkest, most dangerous parts of the ships, where debris was still falling, where unknown weapons could still go off at the wrong time, lopping off hands or feet.

They’re coming.

Go.

She wasn’t going out of the Mausoleum; but instead she’d been going deeper and deeper into it. “You should leave,” she said to Công.

Công didn’t budge.

“You heard Nai. You warned me.”

Công exhaled. Her hands were luminous now; and Thuận Lộc, looking down at her own hands, saw them shining as well, with the older, fainter version of the same circuitry gleaming under her skin. They itched, with a faint, almost familiar pain.

“Will you—” Công took a deep, shaking breath. “Will you take me outside?”

Oh, child.

A dozen, a thousand thoughts pressing themselves against the confines of Thuận Lộc’s skulls, so fast, so sharp they were almost physically painful. “I’m not going to escape.”

“No,” a voice said, behind her. “You’re not.”

Thuận Lộc turned, and saw Dao.

She’d grown older now: leaner and more skeletal, her eyes recessed into large, dark hollows, her lips thin slivers, like sharp wires. She wore the robes of an Architect, and in her hands she held a control interface—a small, sharp, lethal thing, a thin sliver of metal hooked up to the security system of the Mausoleum.

“You—” she said.

Dao smiled. Nai’s smile had been bitter; Dao’s was wounding. Fear spiked through Thuận Lộc; a sense of things gone wrong, slipping from her grasp. The only thing that came to her was the truth. “I came back for you. And Nai.”

“I know,” Dao said. She seemed…almost sad. Almost pitying. “To save what cannot be saved.”

“You’re one of them. You—”

“Better the hunter than the hunted,” Dao said.

Thuận Lộc remembered running—through corridors where everyone scattered ahead of her, through the scraggle of vegetation and the ruins—the awful thrumming of the dead ships’ motors mingling with the high-pitched whine of the Hunt’s gliders. She didn’t remember the harpoon—what she remembered was pain, transfixing her—her stumbling, falling to her knees, struggling to breathe, a feeling of warmth choking her lungs—and the glider that had thrown the harpoon moving closer and closer…

“No,” she said.

“That’s not a choice you can make for me,” Dao said.

No, she couldn’t. Not anymore than she could save Nai. But—

She stared at Công. At everything around her—that mass of undifferentiated ships’ insides that the Architects were forever failing to fix. “They’re dead,” she said, sharply. “They won’t come back. Not ever. And neither will I.”

“You never could understand the way the world worked,” Dao said, with that same sadness in her eyes. She gestured at Công, asking her to move. The child didn’t move. Her lips pinched, and her expression wasn’t pleasant anymore. “So be it. Everything can be called back, with enough effort.” She pressed down on the control interface: it lit up, for a brief moment. “Run,” she said, and her smile was wide, and wicked.

This time, there was a whine that still echoed in her nightmares—and the distant shadows of gliders, getting closer and closer.

This time, the Hunt was coming.

Thuận Lộc grabbed Công’s hand, and ran.

It was her worst nightmares come to life—corridor after corridor, dark and twisted, obstacles she couldn’t see, stumbling, cursing, and all the while the whine of the Hunt getting closer and closer. People, scared, running—not from her, but from what came after her.

She’d tried to push Công away, but the child had resisted—and really, she couldn’t. It was too late, for either of them. The palms of their hands were light—hers were itching, in that moment before they burnt.

Thuận Lộc stumbled; again—and the harpoon thrown by one of the gliders buried itself in the wall instead of her. Light crackled on its edges; and the wall melted around it, tightening as if welcoming back something of itself.

Thuận Lộc stared at it, in shock. It was Công who pushed her, the child’s face incandescent with fear. “Come on!” she screamed. “Come on!”

On and on and on, corridor after corridor, hangar after hangar, room after room after room, and the ships’ motors and the high-pitched whine of the Hunt were merging into a single sound that felt like a blade driven into her, again and again and again. On and on and on, Công’s hand warm in hers, the only thing that was keeping her going. On and on and on.

Ahead, light.

Outside. The fragmentary ruins that marked the boundary zone. It was open-air: there would be nothing to shelter them, or to slow down gliders that could move much faster than them.

It was over. There was no escaping the Hunt. Not a second time. Thuận Lộc was struggling to breathe. “I can’t—” she said. “I just—”

Công stared at her. Thuận Lộc braced herself for the sting of disappointment—for anger even. But instead, Công nodded, grimly. She pushed her hands into the walls. The wires stretched, glistening. “What are you doing?”

“It’s there,” Công said. “Can’t you hear it? The ship?”

“The ship is dead! They’re all dead!” The whine of the approaching Hunt was intolerable; Thuận Lộc fell to her knees, unable to breathe or focus. “The ship—”

Công smiled. “Everything can be called back,” she said.

Light spread, from Công’s hands—the faint circuitry lit up, under her skin and under the skin of the wall. Time slowed down—one, two held breaths—and something huge was rising, the same something Thuận Lộc had felt as they’d run the first time.

For a moment—a bare, intolerably hurtful moment—Thuận Lộc thought they were saved.

And then something whistled in the air, as the gliders of the Hunt approached—and Công slumped, with a harpoon in her shoulder pinning her to the wall. The light around her hands flickered and died, and that terrible presence withdrew.

No. No. No.

Thuận Lộc laid her hands against the wall—circuits lighting up, connections that hadn’t been activated in so long sluggishly coming back to life. She could feel the motors that were the ships’ heartbeats, the sounds she’d heard for so many years as a child—and, more distantly, that huge and terrible attention that had followed her in the Mausoleum until she’d left. But it was turning away. She was too old, too removed from it. It had answered the desperate vitality of children; Thuận Lộc, adult and who had already died once, was no longer a child.

No.

Please.

The gliders were circling them now—no time left until they dived for the kill. Công’s eyes were open: she was breathing hard, her gaze silently pleading with Thuận Lộc to do something, anything.

It was her fault. Everything she’d ever done turning out inadequate—lack of planning, lack of vision, lack of everything. As Nai had said—she’d never left the Mausoleum, and now it was going to be the death of her and of Công. And she’d brought herself to run just a little further for Công’s sake; but now she was out of everything that would have kept her going—and not even the thought of others could sustain her.

It was over—and she braced herself for the impact of a harpoon’s blade; and the darkness that would follow.

It was—

Her hands were warm. She remembered what she’d told An Nhiên. I survived it once.

She’d walked away from the Mausoleum. She’d been transfixed by a spear; but she’d survived it. She’d walked, stumbling, until the Hunt gave up on her—until they believed she would die and wasn’t worth the effort.

She’d done it once. And then, willingly—knowing everything that went on inside—she’d gone back.

Neither Nai nor Dao had chosen to leave with her; but her success wasn’t measured by the choices of others to perpetuate a cycle; or she wasn’t bound by others’ fear and greed.

She’d done it once. She was neither as weak nor as much of a failure as she believed. And—away from Nai, away from Dao, away from their utter, senseless certainties—she could think clearly.

That terrible presence had come to her the first time she’d run. No, not the first time she’d run. But the first time she’d walked the corridors of the Mausoleum with the memories of childhood bright in her mind.

She’d never left the Mausoleum; never put the weight of those years behind her—but it meant she could recall, with awful and specific vividness, what had happened then. She could remember what it had felt like, to be a child.

Please please please.

Her hands burnt—without smoke, without pain—like that time Linh’s hands had blackened from the ports outwards, except that it was just radiance, swallowing everything up. And she felt—

The ship.

They were large, and terrible, and almost beyond recall—their self spread across the molten mass of what had been their body—of what had been many ships’ bodies, but all of the others were dead now, and they were the only being left. They gathered themself at the point of contact—the wires in Thuận Lộc hands and in Công’s hands.

Công, breathing shallowly, pressed her hands against the wall. “The Hunt,” she said, and the presence tightened. Flashes of something—of an emotion so vast they could barely comprehend it.

The gliders the Architects had made, descended from ship technology. “They’re yours,” Thuận Lộc said. “Your descendants.”

Puzzlement—and then that huge attention moving on from her and Công—something stretching, turning, a shadow so large it could crush her and never even notice. The ship took in the gliders, still whirling around Thuận Lộc and Công—and then it stretched further and further, into the depths of corridors and unrecognisable rooms, and the ceaseless toil of children. The endless scavenging and stripping for parts: a continuous breaking-up of what remained of their body, hurt inflicted on others in their name.

This time the emotion was clear: it was anger.

Of course. They were like Thuận Lộc had once been. Or worse. Used. Taken apart. Measured and weighed and scavenged.

Never, the ship whispered. They stretched—and the gliders of the Hunt keened, spinning and screaming–and that attention moved to encompass them—to stretch and change them, wresting control of them away from the Architects.

Never!

Move. Thuận Lộc had to move, or it was going to be too late for Công. She disentangled herself from the wall. She reached towards Công, wriggling the harpoon until it came loose. Công—eyes still open but vitreous and shivering in and out of focus—would have fallen if Thuận Lộc hadn’t caught her.

“Where—?”

“Out,” Thuận Lộc said. She slung Công over her shoulders, breathing hard. An Nhiên’s shed wasn’t that far: she’d have something to stem the bleeding, to heal the wound—as she’d once done for Thuận Lộc.

Behind Thuận Lộc, the gliders had stopped screaming: they were standing as if at attention—and the ship was there, waiting for something from her or from Công. Orders?

Thuận Lộc thought of everyone toiling in the belly of the Mausoleum; of Nai; Dao and the Architects; and the way that some cycles kept going on and on, making new hurts with every turn of their wheels. “I don’t know,” she said, finally.

Silence, from the ship. It was growing difficult for her to feel connected to them anymore—everything that had been so vivid now felt as though it’d burnt away in the same kind of conflagration that had formed the Mausoleum in the first place.

She opened her mouth to say she didn’t know, but she did. She’d seen what it did to Nai, what it did to Dao, what it did to her. “It’s your choice and I can’t make it for you. But I think it has to end. The Mausoleum. The Architects,” Thuận Lộc said.

A distant sense of approval—that distant anger again, and the gliders turning back, towards the inside of the Mausoleum. Towards those who had sought to turn a ship to their own ends.

Thuận Lộc turned away from the gliders; away from the vengeful ship and the Mausoleum that would soon be torn apart. She focused on putting one foot in front of another, with the weight of Công on her shoulders—walking away from the past until the vibrations of the Mausoleum were nothing but memory, toothless and fast fading.

( Editors’ Note: “The Mausoleum’s Children” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny MagazinePodcast_, Episode 52A.)_

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© 2023 Aliette de Bodard

Award Honors: Hugo Award Finalist- Best Short Story, Locus Award Finalist- Best Short Story