I stared at the tiger, transfixed. It could have pounced on me in that moment and I wouldn’t have moved. My mother made a low half-growl in the back of her throat.
“Becoming human has nothing to do with flat faces and weak noses and walking on two legs,” the tiger said. “That’s what your people always get wrong. It’s the hunger for gossip and bedroom entanglements and un-fox-ish loyalties; it’s about having a human heart. I, of course, don’t care one whit about such matters, so I will never be trapped in human-shape. But for reasons I have never fathomed, foxes always lose themselves in their new faces.”
“We appreciate the advice,” my mother said, tail thumping against the ground. “I will steal you some incense.” I could tell she was desperate to leave.
The tiger waved a paw, not entirely benevolently. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account, little vixen. And tell your aunt I warned her, assuming you get the chance.”
Two weeks after that visit, I heard of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s unfortunate demise. It was not enough to deter me from the path I had chosen.
~ ~ ~
“Come on, fox,” Jong said. “If your offer is sincere, you have nothing to fear from a mythical tiger.”
I refrained from snapping that ‘mythical’ tigers were the most frightening of all. Ordinary tigers were bad enough. Now that I was old enough to appreciate how dangerous tiger-sages were, I preferred not to bring myself to one’s attention. But remaining tied up like this wasn’t appealing, either. And who knew how much time I had to extract myself from this situation?
“I swear on the blood of the tiger-sages,” I said, “that I will keep my bargain with you. No fox tricks.” I could almost hear the tiger-sage’s cynical laughter in my head, but I hoped it was my imagination.
Jong didn’t waste time making additional threats. She unbuckled herself and leaned over me to undo my bonds. I admired her deft hands. Those could have been mine, I thought hungrily; but I had promised. While a fox’s word might not be worth much, I had no desire to become the prey of an offended tiger. Tiger-sages took oaths quite seriously when they cared to.
My limbs ached, and it still hurt when I swallowed or talked. Small pains, however, and the pleasure of being able to move again made up for them. “Thank you,” I said.
“I advise being human if you can manage it,” Jong said. I choked back a snort. “The seat will be more comfortable for you.”
I couldn’t argue the point. Despite the pain, I was able to focus enough to summon the change-magic. Magic had its own sense of humor, as always. Instead of outdated court dress, it presented me in street-sweeper’s clothes, right down to the hat. As if a hat did anything but make me look ridiculous, especially inside a cataphract.
To her credit, Jong didn’t burst out laughing. I might have tried for her throat if she had, short-tempered as I was. “We need to”—yawn—”keep moving. But the pursuers are too close. Convince the small gods to conceal us from their scan, and we’ll keep going until we find shelter enough to rest for real.”
Jong’s faith in my ability to convince the small gods to do me favors was very touching. I had promised, however, which meant I had to do my best. “You’re in luck,” I said; if she heard the irony in my voice, she didn’t react to it. “The small gods are hungry tonight.”
Feeding gods was tricky business. I had learned most of what I knew from Great-Aunt Seonghwa. My mother had disdained such magic herself, saying that she would trust her own fine coat for camouflage instead of relying on gods, to say nothing of all the mundane stratagems she had learned from her own mother. For my part, I was not too proud to do what I had to in order to survive.
The large gods of the Celestial Order, who guided the procession of stars, responded to human blandishments: incense (I often wondered if the tiger I had met lit incense to the golden statue, or if it was for her own pleasure), or offerings of roast duck and tangerines, or bolts of silk embroidered with gold thread. The most powerful of the large gods demanded rituals and chants. Having never been bold enough to eat a shaman or magician, I didn’t know how that worked. (I remained mindful of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s fate.) Fortunately, the small gods did not require such sophistication.
“Can you spare any part of this machine?” I asked Jong.
Her mouth compressed. Still, she didn’t argue. She retrieved a screwdriver and undid one of the panels, joystick and all, although she pocketed the screws. “It’s not like the busted arm’s good for anything anymore,” she said. The exposed wires and pipes of coolant looked like exposed veins. She grimaced, then fiddled with the wires’ connectors until they had all been undone. “Will this do?”
I doubted the small gods knew more about cataphract engineering than I did. “Yes,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and took the panel from her. I pressed my right hand against the underside of the panel, flinching in spite of myself from the metal’s unfriendly warmth.
This is my offering, I said in the language of forest and mountain, which even city foxes spoke; and my mother, as a very proper fox, had raised me in the forest. Earth and stone and—
Jong’s curse broke my concentration, although the singing tension in the air told me that the small gods already pressed close to us, reaching, reaching.
“What is it?” I said.
“We’ll have to fight,” Jong said. “Buckle in.”
I had to let go of the panel to do so. I had just figured out the straps—the cataphract’s were more complicated than the safety restraints found in automobiles—and the panel clanked onto the cockpit’s floor as the cataphract rumbled awake. The small gods skittered and howled, demanding their tribute. I was fox enough to hear them, even if Jong showed no sign of noticing anything.
The lights in the cockpit blazed up in a glory of colors. The glow sheened in Jong’s tousled hair and reflected in her eyes, etched deep shadows around her mouth. The servos whirred; I could have sworn the entire cataphract creaked and moaned as it woke.
I scooped up the panel. Its edges bit into my palms. “How many?” I asked, then wondered if I should be distracting Jong when we were entering combat.
“Five,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, finish it fast.”
The machine lurched out of the crevice where we’d been hiding, then broke into its version of a run. My stomach dropped. Worse than the jolting gait was the fact that I kept bracing for the impact of those heavy metal feet against the earth. I kept expecting the cataphract to sink hip-deep. Even though the gods of earth and stone cushioned each stride, acting as shock-absorbers, the discrepancy between what I expected and what happened upset my sense of the world’s equilibrium.
The control systems made noises that had only shrillness to recommend them. I left their interpretation to Jong and returned my attention to the small gods. From the way the air in the cockpit eddied and swirled, I could tell they were growing impatient. Earth and stone were allied to metal, after all, and metal, especially when summoned on behalf of a weapon, had its volatile side.
The magic had provided me not with a knife this time but with a hat pin. I retrieved it and jabbed my palm with the pointy end. Blood welled up. I smeared it onto the cataphract’s joystick. Get us out of here, I said to the small gods. Not eloquent, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything better.
The world tilted askew, pale and dark and fractured. Jong might have said something. I couldn’t understand any of it. Then everything righted itself again.
More, the small gods said in voices like shuddering bone.
I whispered stories to them, still speaking in the language of forest and mountain, which had no words except the evocation of the smell of fallen pine needles on an autumn morning, or loam worked over by the worms, or rain filling paw prints left in the mud. I was still fox enough for this to suffice.
“What in the name of the blistering gods?” Jong demanded. Now even she could hear the clanging of distant bells. Music was one of the human innovations that the small gods had grown fond of.
“They’re building mazes,” I said. “They’ll mask our path. Go!”
Her eyes met mine for a moment, hot and incredulous. Then she nodded and jerked a lever forward, activating the walk cycle. The cataphract juddered. The targeting screen flashed red as it locked on an erratically moving figure: another cataphract. She pressed a trigger.
I hunched down in my seat at the racket the autocannon made as it fired four shots in rapid succession, like a damned smith’s hammer upon the world’s last anvil. The small gods rumbled their approval. I forced myself to watch the targeting screen. For a moment I thought Jong had missed. Then the figure toppled sideways.
“Legged them,” Jong said with vicious satisfaction. “Don’t care about honor or kill counts, it’s good enough to cripple them so we can keep running.”
We endured several hits ourselves. While the small gods could confuse the enemies’ sensors, the fact remained that the cataphract relied on its metal armor to protect its inner mechanisms. The impacts rattled me from teeth to marrow. I was impressed that we hadn’t gone tumbling down.
And when had I started thinking of us as “we,” anyway?
“We’re doomed,” I said involuntarily when something hit the cataphract’s upper left torso—by the I’d figured out the basics of a few of the status readouts—and the whole cockpit trembled.
Jong’s grin flickered sideways at me. “Don’t be a pessimist, fox,” she said, breathless. “You ever hear of damage distribution?”
“Damage what?”
“I’ll explain it to you if we—” A shrill beep captured her attention. “Whoops, better deal with this first.”
“How many are left?”
“Three.”
There had been five to begin with. I hadn’t even noticed the second one going down.
“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.
In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.
Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.
You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.
A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.
Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.
“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,’“ I said.
She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”
I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”
I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”
“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.
“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”
Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?
“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.
“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”
Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.”
“You’re a parliamentarian, then.”
“Yes.”
This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.
Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.
The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.
Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—
“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.
Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”
“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-and-amber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”
“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shape-changing foxes.
“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”
I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”
Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”
“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.
“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.
“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”
The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.
“I can eat you,
” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”
“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”
I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.
~ ~ ~
The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.
Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.
I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.
“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.
“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.
I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.
“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”
“It’s not a curse,” I said quietly.
“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”
“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”
The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”