Ninth City Burning (33 page)

C
adet Rachel Ochre, who I am to call Rae, is waiting patiently for me outside Lab 111 when I arrive at 2317, not at all impatient over my seventeen-minute unpunctuality.

“I've got the R-102s underneath my uniform,” she informs me as I open the laboratory door. Demonstrating sound common sense and logical reasoning, she has brought a towel as well. “Are we going swimming?”

“We're going to measure your viatic output,” I tell her. Before us, Lab 111 slowly illuminates to reveal a large, square room, virtually empty save for a shallow pool of water set into the center. The pool is circular in shape and divided into several smaller concentric rings by means of retractable dividers, an arrangement that has the look of a gigantic liquid bull's-eye.

Most theories of irrational mechanics posit that, within an umbris, there is an infinite and inexhaustible quantity of thelemic potential. No one has figured out a way to actually prove this, or to measure thelemity directly, nor have we found a reliable way to quantify the ability of a given revenna or revennus to absorb and harness its energy. The only thing we can do, it seems, is measure thelemity's effects—that is, the results brought about by thelemic manipulation;
exempli gratia
if someone is manifesting electricity by means of thelemity, we would measure that manifestation in watts; if the energy in question is heat, we would measure in joules,
et cetera
. Animation, unknown before the war, was first described by Dr. Xiao Jyun Zi, who called the energy used to bring inanimate matter to life “viaty.” The basic unit of viatic power, equal to the energy required to animate one cubic centimeter of distilled water, is named the “xiao” after her.

I am about to explain all of this to Rae, my first lesson as her tutor,
when she says, “Oh, for animation, right?” She has already removed her jacket, kicked out of her shoes, and begun working on her trousers.

“That's right.” I have with me no fewer than five notebooks of calculations and designs, which I set down on the squat, podium-like structure overlooking the circular pool. “Have you already had your efficiency evaluations?”
1

“No, but we've studied it some in class,” she says.

“Great.” I do my best not to sound like I expected her brain to be more or less blank of all relevant education, which was absolutely the case. I think back, trying to recall what I studied when I was in Sixth Class. “So you're learning about irregular energies?”

“Only that one really,” she says, and adds with a self-effacing shrug, “I'm a dud with all the rest I've tried.”

That doesn't surprise me. Manifesting irregular energies without at least some understanding of the underlying theory borders on impossible. If Rae can animate by instinct alone, she's an even better prospect than I'd hoped. We'll see.

“All right,” I say, once I've managed to activate the lab, the circular pool lighting from below with a soft white glow, the clear barrier over the water retracting just enough to expose the center of the bull's-eye. “Go stand in the middle there. When I give you the signal, I want you to animate as much of the water as you can.”

The central pool holds 250,000 cubic centimeters of water, covering Rae to the ankles. If she can animate the whole thing, it will be an output of 250,000 Xi (xiaos, that is), or 250 kXi (kilo-xiaos, known informally as “kicks”). I'll need her to produce at least 4,000 kicks if she's going to have any hope of getting the Project to work.

Twenty minutes later, Rae is floating neck deep in a pillar of water nearly three meters tall, holding steady at 5,000 kicks like it's nothing.
“How am I doing?” she asks, treading water, wet hair toffee-brown and slicked over her head.

“Good,” I say, furiously scribbling readings into my notebook. “Stupendous. Exemplary. You ready to try the next ring?”

She bobs up, legs kicking through the suspended water. “Let's do it!”

I introduce her to the Project that same night. Rae is exactly what I need, and though the Project is a long way from ready, I decide there's no point in remaining mysterious. Lady takes the unexpected company in stride, altering her homemaker's outfit to play the gracious hostess, apologizing profusely for the state of our workshop and its resemblance to the site of an extinction-level natural disaster, while I dismantle the concealing artifice at the corner of my workshop.

It occurs to me only after the artifice has dissolved from its skewed, cubist-looking representation of empty space—little more than token camouflage, I admit, and not nearly enough to dissuade anyone intent on finding the Project—to the Project himself, hanging from the ceiling like a side of meat, joints mangled from blown gwayd canals, knees dragging, knuckles resting palm up against the floor, that, excepting yours truly, Rae is the first real, actual, physical human being to see him. A wave of nervous apprehension rushes over me, and I wait, breath held, for her reaction.

But Rae is already approaching the Project, extending her hands, reverently taking one of his massive fingers between her palms, and when she looks back at me, it is with the awed, rapturous expression of someone who has just been handed a newborn infant. “What's his name?” she asks, voice slightly lowered, as if to avoid waking the Project from his slumber. Somehow she knows, instinctively, that the Project is a “he.”

“His name?” I say disingenuously; I was not prepared for this question.

“Yeah,” she says, half mocking now. “They all have names—something to strike terror into the hearts of your enemies, right? So what do you call him? SkullBreaker? PuppyEater? GrannyDisemboweler?”

I might as well tell her. We're in this together now. “Snuggles.”

Rae lets loose a single bright peal of laughter. “Snuggles! I love it!”

“I want you to help me make him work,” I say. “Someone has to animate him, so I can get his functions calibrated. It won't be easy, but I'm sure you can do it.”

“Think about it before you say yes,” Lady says, her foreboding tone only a little ironic. “He's a mean one, is our Snuggles.”

“Aw, no way,” Rae demurs, gazing fondly up at the Project. “He's a pussycat, you can tell. Just look at those eyes.”

“He doesn't have any eyes,” I feel obliged to point out.

“Guess I'll be careful, then.”

In relatively short order, Rae has become a common fixture of the workshop, though as the Project still requires a good amount of stitching up following his last attempted activation, most of her time is spent listening to me and Lady lecture on various topics in irrational mechanics, I in my work suit reassembling the Project's mangled mechanisms, Lady in tweed and owlish spectacles strutting in front of a dusty chalkboard.

I had expected Rae's background in theoretical irrationality to be spotty at best. Instead, it turns out to be more or less nonexistent, the upshot being that everything I've seen her do, from grand feats of animation to a few crude but pretty spectacular manifestations, she has pulled off with little more than intuition and natural talent. No surprise, then, she'd be defeated by irregular energies, which are essentially nonintuitive and unnatural. In the case of regular energies, she has a whole lifetime of experience to use as reference. She can feel her way to the desired result. Feel doesn't work for irregular energies—most of them, anyway—because they fly in the face of the ordered universe we've always known. Akyrity, for example, takes a big steaming dump all over the first law of thermodynamics, and even if that isn't something most people recognize on sight, it still gives us the willies. Asking Rae to manipulate a force like that is like asking someone with no formal training in mathematics to multiply imaginary numbers. So step one for her will be to fill in gaps. I fish out all the textbooks I absconded with from Grammar and assign them as homework. Rae is less than overjoyed but acquiesces when I explain this reading is required and nonnegotiable.

Per Rae's request, we focus on subjects relating directly and unambiguously to combat. Contrary to her own self-assessment, she has a good, intuitive grasp on one of the most important and fundamental concepts in irrational mechanics, to wit, that mastery thereof is as much art as science.
2

“Like giving orders to a willful child” is Rae's analogy, delivered like a girl who's had a good deal of experience in that area.

We've been discussing compounding,
3
a topic essential to creating complex artifices but also necessary to making effectual use of thelemity in combat. When Rae first came to me, the very mention of compound artifices sent her into paroxysms of despair. To her, the subject was as unintelligible as a foreign language, which in a sense it is. The method the Academy teaches for composing artifices relies on heavily stylistic diction and syntax, creating verbal traps and cages with the goal of limiting thelemity's opportunities to go rogue and muck things up. It works well enough, but if you haven't been raised to it, the general impression is of so much gobbledygook. On top of that, most high-level compound artifices, by dint of their length and complexity, are also infusions, a subject in which Rae has already declared herself an ignoramus and an unteachable clod.

Once Rae understood that the Academy's labyrinthine style is only a means to an end, that there are multiple methods of producing the same effect, just as the same artifice can yield varying results on different occasions, it didn't take her long to come around to the one thing every good
artifex understands: that manipulating thelemity is about persuasion, not command.
4

What all this means in Rae's case is that memorizing the Academy's usual canon of artifices is going to be disproportionately less effective for her compared to your average cadet. Instead, I give her exercises to help translate them into her own vernacular. After that, her progress is exponential. In hardly any time at all, she's writing basic infusions, generally on topics tending unnervingly toward gratuitous violence.

I'm curious to learn why Rae is so anxious to fling herself into a war she's only recently discovered, a war that was fought to a stalemate long before she was born and shows no indication of resolving itself anytime soon, but asking would be nosy and rude, and so I know Lady will say something if I just wait.

What we discover is that Naomi, the Legion's newest fontana, is actually Rae's baby sister, and Rae's single-minded determination to join the Legion is all about watching the girl's back. Not to protect her—Rae has few illusions about being anything but a squashable bug in a duel between fontani—but just so her sister won't have to go to war alone. Vinneas had described to me the frankly horrific series of events that led to that little girl's ending up in the Legion, and listening to Rae talk about her I feel outright ashamed at my own petty motivations. Whenever the subject of Naomi comes up, I find myself silently focusing on my work while Lady assures Rae we'll have her fit for legionary duty in no time.

And the work does progress quickly: It isn't long before Rae and the Project are both ready for some partials. I'm not at all surprised to learn Rae was a standout anima in her Sixth-Class lessons, but all the raw talent in the world wouldn't be enough to safely attempt activating an uncalibrated equus, let alone an experimental model composed largely of my own cockamamie inventions.

At the Academy, Rae could have expected at least a year or two fooling
around with bloog-sculpted dogs and cats, followed by another year working her way through a program of increasingly complex and demanding equulei, before they let her anywhere near a working equus,
5
but lacking any of the necessary training equipment, we'll just have to hook her up and see what happens.

The first attempt is only a minor disaster, which to me translates as almost unprecedented success. With great gentleness and many words of apology, I remove the Project's arm, detaching the shoulder at the socket, and mount it on the mostly refurbished egg crate in a position allowing ample support and range of motion. Rae I seat on a makeshift throne at the crate's center, about where the core would be were we dealing with a full equus and not a disembodied arm, and connect her by means of a thick, sapphire-colored cable of twisting gwayd canals. She has no trouble projecting herself into the arm, and the twisting and flexing exercises she performs at my request are convincing if a little clumsy, until I ask her to count to five on the Project's fingers, and at four the hand goes rigid and chops violently downward, shattering a row of bookcases.

“Oh, Kizabel, I'm sorry!” Rae gasps, gwayd-covered and gazing in self-recriminating horror at the surrounding devastation, the Project's arm like a fallen tower, limp but for the hand's clawlike rictus.