Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

I don’t want to be saved, I want everyone to stop fighting, Khiruev thought, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of contradicting her.

“One fox is smarter than one hound; a pack of hounds is another beast entirely. And I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.”

“You’ve got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to make a point,”

Jedao turned the video off. “Khiruev—” The sudden use of her name made her wary. “—if I ever think it’s all right to do that to someone, shoot me. I don’t care how rational I make it sound. I have a history of sounding very rational, and we all know where that ends.”

Khiruev had reservations about the reliability of intuition when it came to people so alien that they made scouts out of child-bird-insect-flower composites.

The dying moths sent databursts almost as one. Crystal fibers. A cavalcade of pale-lipped flowers. The cries of flightless birds pecking their way up through the floors. Walls grown over with mouths breathing wetly.

I don’t object to atrocities because of ethics, which we’ve never taught at Shuos Academy anyway.”

The room was overwhelmingly blue-and-cream, so soothing that Brezan’s shoulder blades itched.

Apparently, Jedao was conflating being a genetic contributor and being a parent, even if the donor was not part of the contracted household.

Every time the Weraio system came up in the digests, she’d scanned them for any mention that Miifau’s orchestra had gotten bombed. It was a stupid thing to care about, especially when so many people died everywhere, in every passing moment. Yet the fractal nature of the hexarchate’s fight against heresy made it impossible to care about those blotted numbers.

His words spoke of one thing. His eyes, as sweet and merciless as ashes, spoke of another.

After that, Khiruev made a point of consciously sabotaging all her relationships by choosing unsuitable partners on the grounds that this beat doing it unconsciously.

“What did I do this time?” “Nothing,” Istradez said. “No one ever says ‘nothing’ and means it.”

It’s about standing together against the hexarchs, not shooting them down.

Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull where the Vidona couldn’t see them.

“I’m Agent Shuos Feiyed. You know, if it were up to me, I’d fucking recruit you. I put three of my people on report because you slipped out from under their noses earlier.”

The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

In her hand she held an instrument that resembled a spoon, if a spoon had incandescently sharp edges.

The last thought she had before her benefactor’s drugs scoured everything to static was that there would be no one to restore the garden.

“We finally have a Shuos hexarch capable of hanging on to the seat longer than a hiccup, and the man has the attention span of a ferret. He probably got bored of the invasion in the first week and is off learning to bake custards instead.”

“I must admit,” Janaia said, “this strikes me as a singularly bad time for an insurrection.” “This is the hexarchate, Commander. There’s never a good time.”

“Because you know what? It is a shitty system. We have a whole faction devoted to torturing people so the rest of us can pretend we’re not involved.

Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. He could have warned his fellow hexarchs, but it was going to be more fun to watch them discover it for themselves.

“I don’t care if Cheris never had a chance against the hexarchs. I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it.”