Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

“You think you have paperwork, you should see mine.” You think I don’t?

When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger.

guns change minds, not hearts.

Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.

At the edges of the formation, the non-pivot positions, humans and servitors both, were changing into pillars of candescent numbers. Naraucher shouldn’t have been able to recognize the numbers at this distance, but he could. Most but not all were in the high language’s vertical script. Machine Universal was identifiable as such, although he couldn’t read it. He couldn’t have justified this conviction, but he would have said that the numbers were numbers that mattered. Birthdays and festival days. A child’s shoe size. The number of times a soldier visited a crippled comrade. The specific gravity of a favorite wine. The number of bullets left in a pistol. The distance from this siege to a childhood home, remembered but never visited. The number of soldiers a Kel general was willing to sacrifice to achieve her objective.

The ward’s population had been estimated at 43,000 people. It wasn’t that the number was high. It wasn’t. Weniat knew what large numbers looked like. It was the ratio. Everyone dead.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid.” Gized’s mouth twisted. “You’re usually a better liar than this, Jedao. Frankly, that worries me more than anything else.”

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.