Kyrria smiled, or at least, Bianca supposed it was a smile; she showed off a terrifying array of teeth, anyway, with long curving canines.

  “She’s a Hacan, right?” Bianca whispered to Voyou. Ayla had provided Bianca with very little information about the other inhabitants of the galaxy, but she’d been able to access a children’s book called Rivals to the Barony that included brief descriptions of other species, including the Hacan, though the alien in the picture had been holding a curved sword and a severed head and had blood smeared all around her mouth.

  “That’s right,” Voyou murmured. “If you shake hands with one, count your fingers afterward.”

  Bianca suppressed a gasp. “They eat fingers?”

  “What? No. Or, I suppose they might – who knows what they eat? I just mean, they’re famous negotiators and traders.”

  “Oh. I thought they went around beheading people all the time.”

  “Not in my experience,” Voyou said. “Though it can’t hurt to be watchful.”

  Bianca wondered what else in the children’s book was inaccurate or slanted. Perhaps the Hylar weren’t really building doomsday weapons on the bottom of the sea, and the Gashlai didn’t destroy planets because they liked how pretty the explosions were, and the N’orr weren’t desperate to lay their eggs in Letnev abdomens. The book had been rather alarming for a work aimed at children, but Bianca supposed many of them had a taste for the bloody and the macabre. She certainly would have devoured a book like that if she’d found it at the Halemeeting Hall.

  Kyrria was explaining herself. “So you see, Brother Errin has little patience or interest in matters of the world, preferring to dwell wholly in the realms of science… but, alas, tissue vats and chemical printers and genomic scanners cost money, and I make sure he has all the resources necessary for his work. That’s why I’m here. We’re still waiting for your consultation, and we’ll need it before you go any deeper into the Tree of Grace.”

  “You haven’t paid them yet?” Archambelle glared at Richeline, who winced.

  “I submitted all the paperwork, and the captain expedited things, but you know how the procurement office can be. Let me see what the holdup is.” She stepped off into a niche beside a plant and began jabbing furiously at a hand terminal.

  Bianca took a step forward and cleared her throat. “Hello,” she said to Kyrria. “Why is this place called the Tree of Grace? The tree part I can see, but…”

  The Hacan looked down at her from a great height, then crouched so their eyes were at the same level. “Brother Errin is a member of the Yin Brotherhood. They come from the Lael system, and Errin grew up there, in the Lucas monastery. The monastery stands on a place called the Hills of Grace, and though Brother Errin has parted ways with his fellows, he still considers himself part of their sacred order. He says if he cannot live on the Hills of Grace, he will carry the spirit of the place with him, and so he named this station in their honor.”

  “That’s lovely,” Bianca said. “Thank you for explaining.”

  “You have such nice manners,” Kyrria said. “How did someone so polite end up in the company of the Letnev?”

  “They kidnapped me under false pretenses,” Bianca said. Voyou coughed so loud it sounded like he was choking.

  “That sounds like the Barony,” Kyrria said amiably. “I’m not in a position to rescue you, though I can reach out to the human authorities if you’d like. It’s possible they might intercede, especially if it annoys the Barony.”

  “That’s all right,” Bianca said. “We worked things out. We negotiated the terms of my cooperation.”

  “Your contract was signed by all parties?” Kyrria said.

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “And properly wit–”

  Richeline stepped between them, though there was hardly space to do so, and waved her terminal in Kyrria’s face. “There, the transaction is complete, if we can please get on with the examination?”

  The Hacan showed her teeth again, then checked her own terminal. Once she was satisfied, she bowed her head. “Right this way. Brother Errin is waiting in his lab.”

  Properly wit? Bianca thought. What did she mean? She must have stood with her brow furrowed for too long, because Voyou took her elbow and guided her along the corridor.

  •••

  Brother Errin’s lab was all gleaming metal surfaces and white tile, and the man himself looked just like plenty of other humans Bianca had met, though his head was entirely bald and his skin was an unhealthy, grayish sort of pale.

  “The clients from Letnev are here,” Kyrria said.

  Errin was standing at a workbench, staring into a complex device mounted beneath an array of lenses. He looked up and blinked. His eyes were large and moist-looking, he sniffed constantly, and overall he reminded her of a sick caprid. Maybe not terminally ill, but you’d want to keep him away from the rest of the flock until he got better. “What? Who?”

  Doctor Archambelle pushed herself forward. “Brother Errin. You remember me, I’m sure. Araminta Allencourt Archambelle?”

  “Archie?” He squinted.

  Bianca couldn’t actually hear the doctor grind her teeth, but she certainly sensed it. “That is… what you sometimes call me on the forums, yes.”

  “Can’t remember all those other names,” he said. “Too many, too long. Come and look at this, it’s remarkable, a specimen recovered from a bog, have you ever been to a bog? Horrible places, squishy, look.” He grabbed the doctor by the arm and manhandled her over to the scope, practically pressing her face against a set of lenses. “See, I know what you’re thinking, it’s just Ascaris lumbricoides, but look closer and it’s not, do you see the ring pattern there, it can’t be, doctor – what you’re looking at is a worm unknown to science!”

  “That is fascinating, Brother Errin.” Archambelle stepped away and straightened her jacket. “I brought the woman I told you about. The one with the, ah, genetic anomaly?”

  Errin cocked his head, then slowly followed her pointing finger. “Strange. Strange, strange, strange. I reviewed your samples and they are, something, what’s the word. Strange.” He walked in a slow circle around Bianca, the guards and other Letnev moving aside to give him room. He reached out and touched Bianca’s hair, poked her shoulder, and sniffed at her elbow, and she tolerated all of that, but when he grabbed her lower lip and pulled it down and looked into her mouth, she shouted “Hey!” and he jumped backward.

  “Apologies!” His voice was much too loud. “So much time in the lab, I forget myself, yes, would you believe I used to work in the diplomatic corps, ha, me? Scientific liaison, I was, they brought me to talk to the scientists when we visited other nations, so much talking.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t for me. Wrong path. Had some shocks. Met the Creuss! The Ghosts, you know them?”

  The children’s primer hadn’t mentioned anyone called the Creuss, and Bianca didn’t believe in ghosts, so she shook her head. Errin didn’t seem to notice. “The Creuss, that was hard, I kept it together, for a while, did my job, went to parties, smiled and nodded, but I had nightmares. Every time I went to a new place, I thought, will a Ghost be there, asking me things, ‘Where is music?’ and ‘Would you vapor?’ and ‘Why electric meat?’ I retired. I say I retired. I was not retiring. I made a fuss, I made a scene, I was taken away, then I went away, and here I am.”

  “I see,” Bianca said. “That must have been very hard for you.”

  Errin gave a solemn, big-eyed nod. “Now, here, I do the work. I don’t go anywhere anymore. The same place every day. New people, yes, sometimes, but the same place. My Tree is solid. My Tree won’t come apart. It won’t turn into a ghost under me.” He clapped his hands together in front of her face. “You! An interesting anomaly, hmmm, yes. Let’s get you scanned and see what’s happening inside you. You don’t stay the same, oh no, you don’t dissolve, or haven’t yet at least, but you certainly change.” He hurried over to a console and started pressing buttons, and parts of the wall slid open, revealing person-sized glass cylinders, shelves of vials, and gleaming robot arms tipped with alarming attachments.

  Bianca sidled over to Archambelle. “He’s insane.”

  “Well, yes,” Archambelle said. “But within very predictable parameters, which is functionally identical to being sane. He’s good at his work, the best at his work, and that’s all that matters. If there’s a way to decipher the secrets inside you, he’ll know them.”

  “Take off all your clothes!” Brother Errin shouted.

  Chapter 18

  “I’ll just escort the rest of you outside,” Kyrria said. Archambelle started to object – “We are colleagues, I’m sure Brother Errin wants me here to assist” – and the Hacan simply picked her up, as easily as Bianca would have lifted a teacup, and carried the doctor, stunned and silent, out of the room.

  Voyou patted Bianca on the arm, rather awkwardly. “You’ll be all right,” Voyou said. “He’s, ah… a professional.”

  “Just do as you’re told, Xing.” Richeline beckoned to the guards, who followed her and Voyou out of the lab.

  Bianca disrobed. She was chilly at first, but the lab must have warmed up or something, because a moment later she was perfectly comfortable. At least her weeks undergoing Archambelle’s tests had given her lots of practice being naked around a stranger… though Brother Errin was stranger than most.

  He turned, looked at her, nodded, then returned to his console. “Archie believes in fairy tales, you know. Ancient aliens, former masters of the galaxy, experts in cloning and genetic manipulation. The legends say they were experts on everything, super-scientists with everyday conveniences that violated the laws of physics as we understand them, and cities that soared impossibly high and delved impossibly deep. Supposedly the Mahact could make almost anything. Archie thinks they made you.” He looked at her again, and this time there was a shrewdness and clarity in his eyes she hadn’t noticed before.

  “Wait. Who are the Mahact?”

  Errin clucked his tongue. “What did the Letnev tell you?”

  Oh, no. “Which time?”

  “All the times, please. I’m curious.”

  Bianca told him the first story, about her being the heir to a lost fortune, and the “truth,” that she was the child of a human aristocrat with a treasure map hidden in her genetics. “But I guess that’s not true either?”

  Errin shook his head.

  “Then, what am I?”

  “Something new in the galaxy, I think,” Errin said. “I thought Archie was losing her grip, and believe me, I know about losing your grip, but I’ve seen your test results and who could have made you but the Mahact?”

  “I still don’t know who they are,” she said.

  Errin nodded. “According to old stories, ones almost no one remembers and even fewer people believe, there was once a great empire ruled by a cruel and brilliant people called the Mahact…” Errin told her about the aliens and their purported genetic mastery, and how Archambelle’s research led her to Darit, and how the Letnev hoped she would lead them to the treasure world of Ixth. “Archie thinks Ixth might have been the Mahact homeworld, or maybe just one of their holdings. If you could find it, that would be remarkable. The legends of my people say that on Ixth we’ll finally find the secret to cleansing our genome, and even creating female clones.”

  Bianca took in everything he’d told her and finally said, “Why did the Letnev lie to me? Why not just tell me the truth about this Ixth?”

  “Bianca. They need you to find Ixth. You don’t need them. If you knew the truth, there would be no reason for you to travel with them. You could make your own way, and leave the Letnev behind. They brought you here because they hoped I could tell them your secrets so they wouldn’t actually need you anymore, either. But don’t worry. They’re going to be disappointed, because I don’t think I can give them what they need.”

  “But they’re supposed to work with me. We have a contract!”

  “Oh, do you? I’m sure that’s all right then. I’m sure the Letnev would never try to deceive you.”

  Bianca slumped. “Should you be telling me all this?”

  “I was, in fact, forbidden to tell you any of this, but the Tree of Grace is my domain, and I think it’s only fair you know the truth of your nature. You are a miracle of sorts, Bianca. And you’re being exploited.”

  She nodded slowly, then said, “You aren’t as insane as you seemed to be earlier, are you?”

  He lowered his head and sighed. “When I act mad, it’s not an act. My mind expands and contracts. It comes and goes. But when the wind is right, I can tell a knife from a nightjar. Sometimes I think, when the Creuss made that station come apart, they made part of me come apart, too…”

  “Who are these Creuss you keep talking about?” Bianca said.

  Brother Errin shook his head rapidly. “No, no, no, that’s a tale for another telling. We’re not talking about those bogeymen this time, we’re talking about the Mahact. The Creuss don’t care about flesh, they care about energy, but the Mahact, they were supposed to be sculptors of flesh, wizards with it, gods with it, even. And yes, they did, they did make you. I didn’t say so to Archie, not straight out, because she’s insufferable when she knows she’s right, but looking at the data she collected, and the fragments of unknown provenance she’s gathered over the years, it’s clearly all connected. The mark of Mahact handiwork is all through you, their little signature touches, their embellishments, their elegance. Elegances? All of those.”

  “If you already studied my samples, why am I standing naked in your lab?”

  “Because you are not a static problem, Bianca Xing, you are a dynamic one, and I wished to see how you changed. But yes, come, stand here.” He beckoned and gestured and led her to the wall where the tiles had slid away, indicating a circular podium only a little shorter than Bianca. “I need you to get on the scanner, I have a stepstool somewhere, wait, it’s just–”

  Bianca rolled her eyes, bent her knees, and jumped up onto the platform from the floor. She straightened, turned around on the podium, and resisted the urge to do a curtsy or take a bow.

  Brother Errin looked at her, then at the podium, then at her again. “That is... not a record. No. Not quite a record for highest vertical leap by an unaugmented human at this level of gravity. But it is close to a record, and the person who set the record was much taller and much more muscular and–”

  “I’m in good shape,” Bianca said. “It’s nothing.” But she was blushing. When she’d jumped up onto the platform, it hadn’t felt like a big deal – she’d just instinctively known she could do it – but she certainly hadn’t leapt that high back on Darit. Nobody had. She must have cleared, what, a hundred and twenty centimeters, straight up.

  “The Mahact made you well,” Errin said. “You are not an unaugmented human. Not really human at all. You’re something new. Or something new wrapped around a core of something very old. Please stand as still as you can. Commencing scan.”

  Bianca froze herself in place and held her breath, but more than that, was her heart even beating? Wouldn’t she die if it didn’t beat? And… shouldn’t it be harder to hold her breath? Doing so wasn’t even a strain, not like when she’d competed with the other children to dive to the bottom of the pond to retrieve rocks – that had been hard, and she’d come up gasping. She felt no need to gasp now.

  Am I changing? The thought had occurred to her before, several times, but always in the back of her mind, always quiet, always quickly dismissed. What Errin said about her being a dynamic problem, though… that made the thought louder. Maybe she really was getting stronger, faster, and smarter than she had been before. But how? And why?

  Violet light shone from the walls, and she hoped it wasn’t radioactive or anything. “Lift your arms, please. Hmm. What an interesting vascular system.”

  “People are always telling me that,” Bianca said.

  “I wonder, if I made a clone of you, if the clone would retain your polymorphic qualities. I suspect there are failsafes in place…”

  “You don’t have my consent to make a clone of me.” Bianca crossed her arms and glared down at him.

  “Noted.” He put on a pair of square-rimmed glasses and began drawing in the air, probably interacting with some kind of virtual display… or else the wind was blowing the wrong way again, and he was mad.

  “What are polymorphic qualities?” she said. “What does that mean?”

  “I am under strict instructions to discuss my findings only with Archie and the woman who scowls so much.” His eyes were unreadable behind lenses full of flickering light. Before she could object, he continued. “I refused to sign anything to that effect, of course, so I can say whatever I like. You are the subject of the examination, so you’re entitled to know my findings. Most people, in most species, are born with their genetic code essentially fixed. Sometimes things can change that code – radiation and toxins can damage DNA, or dormant sequences can be activated by environmental factors, and of course individuals are born all the time with random mutations, which survive in successive generations if they turn out to be useful adaptations… or useless but not especially detrimental. Traumatic experiences can cause a change in gene expression, though that only alters the phenotype, not the underlying genotype – that’s known as epigenetics, and allows a parent to pass certain heritable traits to their offspring. Often they’re traits they wouldn’t want to pass on, but it’s not optional. And, of course, with the tools available to us, courtesy of science, we can alter DNA at will, though the results are often unpredictable. Does all that make sense?”

  “It does.” Ayla had been allowed to give her texts on basic biology, at least. She hadn’t even needed to hack the systems for that.

  “Good. Your DNA isn’t like everyone else’s. Your genome is changing, constantly, without recognizable environmental causes or the deliberate actions of anyone, including yourself. Your phenotype – that is, your actual observed physical characteristics – have remained fairly constant, but only on the most superficial level. You look basically the same, is what I mean: you haven’t grown wings or started glowing bright green. But when I look a little deeper, I find significant changes in your bone density, muscle mass, blood volume, synaptic activity, and other systems that aren’t apparent to the unaided eye. You’ve changed a lot since Archie first scanned you on the Grim Countenance.”