Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

The birdform tilted its head, lights whirring from green to yellow to orange. It asked her who she really was. “I’m Ajewen Cheris,” she said. She would call herself Kel no longer. “But I’m also Shuos Jedao. And apparently it’s not time for me to stop fighting.” She had eaten the fox’s eyes. She had seen what he had seen. At the center of the blast, there was a mass of fossilized pasts and devalued futures. The better part of a Kel swarm reduced to carrion glass. Over 8,000 Kel and those in service to the Kel, all to guarantee the death of one man. The deltaform wanted to know where they were going. Cheris smiled crookedly at it. She yanked off her gloves and set them neatly to the side. There was a cold, pale fire in her heart. The hexarchs had no idea how badly they had fucked up. She had gone to a lot of trouble to put herself into the black cradle, one bad option among many worse, so she would have time to run her campaign against the heptarchate. But she couldn’t win her own war. The key to calendrical warfare was mathematics, and the only mathematician she had access to, Nirai Kujen, was more monstrous than she was. Now she had an alternate mathematician, so to speak. I’m dead, she thought, very clearly, as I wanted to be, but I’m alive enough to carry on the war. All her life, she had lived to the hexarchate’s high calendar. Now she lived to another calendar. She would measure her years by the death-day of her swarm, and not by the cold, prim feasts of the Rahal, the...