Ninefox Gambit

CHERIS WAS SITTING at a table outside, shuffling and reshuffling her favorite jeng-zai deck. Normally she didn’t lack for opponents – this was Shuos Academy, after all, and there was always someone who didn’t believe a first-year could be as good as she claimed to be – but the yearly game design competition was going on, and everyone was distracted.

Someone came up from behind and kissed the top of her head. “Hey, you,” said a familiar tenor: Vestenya Ruo, the first friend she’d made here, and her occasional lover. “Dare I hope that I’ve finally gotten the drop on you?” He came around and took a seat on the bench next to her. Like Cheris, he wore the red cadet uniform. The two of them had a theory that the first Shuos heptarch had picked her faction’s colors to make her own people extra-special easy to assassinate from a distance.

Cheris quirked an eyebrow at Ruo. “Hardly,” she said. “You came around that corner by the gingko tree, didn’t you? I saw your reflection in the perfume bottle that guy was fiddling with earlier. Pure luck.”

Ruo punched her shoulder. “You always say it’s luck. Even at the firing range. You don’t get aim that good with luck.”

“I don’t know why you make such a big deal of it when you’re the better shot.”

“Yes, and I’m going to make sure it stays that way.” Ruo grinned at her. “But it’s annoying that I can’t beat your reflexes.”

“I’m hardly a threat to you,” Cheris said patiently. As a point of fact, when they’d first met at some party, Ruo had picked a fight with her. Lots of bruises, no hard feelings, although she had since learned that picking random fights out of a spirit of adventure was the kind of thing Ruo did. She wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, but it wasn’t long before she started hanging out with him, partly because he always thought up terrific pranks, like the one with the color-coded squirrels, but partly so she could keep him from getting into too much trouble.

“Bet you say that to all your targets,” Ruo said. Periodically he tried to persuade Cheris to declare for the assassin track with him, but she hadn’t decided yet. “Say, shouldn’t that girlfriend of yours be done with class about now?”

“‘That girlfriend’ has a name,” said Lirov Yeren, who had come up behind Ruo. Sometimes Cheris despaired of Ruo’s situational awareness. Although Yeren could walk silently, she hadn’t been making any particular effort to be quiet. “Hello, Jedao. Hello, Ruo.” Yeren leaned down, careful not to spill her drink, her curls falling artfully around her face. She and Cheris kissed.

“Hello yourself,” Cheris said. She fanned out her hand, face-up, for Yeren’s amusement.

“Oh, you’re not even pretending not to cheat,” Ruo said. Cheris had arranged to draw a straight of Roses.

“Only because I don’t have any real flowers to offer you, Yeren,” Cheris said, “so I had to make do with the sad cardboard substitute.”

Yeren eyed her sidelong. “I’m pretty sure that line wasn’t in Introduction to Seduction when I took it last year.”

“I hate that course,” Cheris said. “Seriously, all the Andan bars we practice at overcharge for drinks because, hello, the Andan are all rich. You’d think they’d figure it into our stipends, but I think it’s supposed to incentivize us to commit fraud to get by.”

“I don’t see what your issue is,” Ruo said dryly. “You’re terribly good at persuading people to buy you drinks, especially with that whole ‘I just got here from the farm and you civilized city people confuse me’ routine.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Cheris said. Besides, it was technically an agricultural research facility, even if her mother jokingly referred to herself as a farmer.

“You poor thing,” Yeren said. “Drown your sorrows?” She offered her drink.

“See what I mean?” Ruo said.

Cheris took a sip. “That’s a lot of honey,” she said. The local spiced tea was something she was still getting used to. It wasn’t very popular where she came from.

“It’s to cover the taste of the poison,” Yeren said, very seriously.

“Excellent thinking.” Cheris drank again, more deeply, then handed the tea back.

“By the way,” Yeren said, “I keep looking through the competition standings and I’m stumped. Where did you hide your game?”

“Don’t get me started,” Ruo said. “I can’t even get him to play any of the more intriguing entries, let alone admit to entering.”

Cheris shuffled the straight back into her deck and did her best “you civilized city people confuse me” impression. “It’s much less stressful to watch everyone else tie themselves into knots. You heard about how Zheng got caught breaking into the registrar’s computer systems?”

“That’s so yesterday,” Yeren said, “and I don’t believe you for one second. Ruo told me how you volunteered to be outnumbered five to one in that training scenario and you care about stress?”

“Did he also mention I lost that one?” Cheris narrowed her eyes at Ruo, who looked innocent.

“Only after you struck the instructor speechless with your novel use of signal flares,” Ruo said helpfully.

“Got lucky,” Cheris said.

Ruo rolled his eyes. “No such thing as luck.”

Cheris drew three cards in rapid succession: Ace of Roses, Ace of Doors, Ace of Gears. “Sure there is,” she said ironically.

Yeren, who had taught Cheris most of the card tricks herself, ignored this. “I suppose you might take some kind of ridiculous pleasure in an anonymous entry,” she said, “but they’ll trace it to you anyway. Why not put your name on it from the beginning?”

“That’s only if I entered,” Cheris said. “Say, Ruo, you entered a shooter, didn’t you? How’s it doing?” She hadn’t looked it up, but Ruo had talked about it a lot while wrestling with the coding, even if he’d turned down her offer to help by playtesting.

“High middle,” Ruo said, “for its category. As good as I could hope for. I haven’t embarrassed myself, that’s all I ask.” There were always a few entries that did so poorly that they damaged the cadets’ future career options.

Yeren wasn’t distracted. “Jedao, first-years don’t get a lot of opportunities to impress the instructors. I didn’t think you’d pass this one up. Especially considering how much you like games.”

“It’s very altruistic of you to point this out to me,” Cheris said, “but it’s done now, either way.” She touched Yeren’s hand. “We could go for a walk by the koi pond. It wouldn’t kill you to get away from all the competition analysis for an hour or two.”

“This is my cue to go elsewhere,” Ruo said cheerfully. “Don’t scare the geese.” Cheris often thought she should never have mentioned that her mother liked to say that, even if they hadn’t had all that many geese.

“Like you don’t have a hot date of your own lined up,” Yeren said. Ruo looked awfully smug, at that.

“That would be telling,” Ruo said. “Have fun, you two.” He kissed the top of Cheris’s head again, and strolled off.

Yeren shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Cheris’s, either.

As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part.

Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector.

She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out.

“– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook.

“Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake.

Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one of the games,” she said. “At least, they’re claiming it’s a suicide.”

Cheris sat up and made a show of hunting for her clothes, even though she knew where they were under the covers. She still didn’t realize the significance of what Yeren had said. “Anyone we know?” she asked.

“They haven’t released the name. But I did some poking around. I – I think it might be Ruo.”

Cheris’s heartbeat thumped rapidly in her chest. Yeren was still talking. “It was over one of the games,” she said. “I remember glancing over it earlier. The anonymous one involving heresies. Except the cadet didn’t just fool one of us over some minor point of Doctrine. He got caught framing a visiting Rahal magistrate.”

It was exactly the kind of thing that Ruo would have thought hilarious. Except for the part about getting caught. Shuos Academy might have protected one of its cadets if the matter had been a minor infraction; each faction tended not to surrender its own to outsiders as a matter of jurisdictional principle. But the Rahal were also a high faction, and a magistrate – that wasn’t just an infraction, that was an offense for which the guilty party could be tortured to death in a remembrance.

Cheris had opened her mouth to admit that the game had been hers, that she was the one who had killed Ruo, when Yeren went on, “The game’s not anonymous anymore, at any rate. It looks like Chenoi Tiana has confessed that it’s hers. She’s under investigation right now.”

Both of them knew that “under investigation” was unlikely to result in any serious reprimand. Cheris’s heartbeat had slowed. “Who’s Tiana?” she asked.

She had a way out. And she was taking it. She hadn’t realized she had already made the decision.

“She’s a third-year, no reason you should know her,” Yeren said. “I’m so sorry, Jedao. It – I might be wrong. The suicide could be someone else.”

Cheris doubted it. Yeren was very good at hacking. One of the benefits of dating her was learning from her. And the dead cadet being someone else wouldn’t make the situation much better.

She couldn’t put off the hard part. “Ruo was an idiot if he let himself get caught,” she said with deliberate carelessness. “Suicide’s better than hanging around to have your fingers pulled off, so I can’t say that I blame him.”

Yeren made a pained sound. “He was our friend, Jedao.”

Cheris dressed quickly. “Friendship doesn’t mean anything to the dead, and I don’t think either of us wants to be associated with him anyhow.”

“If that’s your take on it,” she said, her voice shaking again, “get out. Maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”

Yeren might have some intention of salvaging the relationship after calming down, but Cheris didn’t. She left without argument.

Cheris headed out to a café. She had arranged for a small null in camera coverage – as the joke went, if you didn’t hack the commandant’s surveillance system at least once as a first-year, you were fit only for the Andan – and she wanted to listen in on the news. People were already gossiping about the suicide.

While Cheris listened to the gossip with half an ear, she started hacking the academy’s grid. The tablet she was using looked like a model that had been popular four years ago, but what wasn’t obvious was that she had wired together the innards from a decrepit laboratory machine she had begged off her mother. Her mother had been amenable so long as she didn’t cause anything to blow up. (She was never going to live down that experiment with the food processor when she was twelve.) She didn’t have any illusions that the tablet’s secret obsolescence would hinder a real Shuos grid diver, but if she worked quickly, she had a chance of getting away with her query.

It didn’t take long for Cheris to find pictures of Ruo’s corpse. Even with the bullet hole in the side of his head, the red-gray mess on the other side, the blood matted in his hair, she recognized him. She would have known him in the dark by his footsteps, or by the taste of his mouth, or the way he always broke left when he was startled. She had assumed that he would always greet her with that kiss on the top of her head, and that they would graduate together, perhaps even apply to the same assignments. All of that was gone now.

Cheris had difficulty concentrating. Up until this point, she had convinced herself that all the game maneuvers existed solely in some abstract space. There was nothing abstract about the fact that she’d killed her best friend.

Still, she wasn’t done yet. As luck would have it, she made it into Tiana’s profile because someone had forgotten to lock it down after making their edits, or someone else had been hacking it before she had and left the doors open.

Two instructors had made private notes in Tiana’s profile. They praised her ruthlessness and her boldness in claiming credit in the wake of a suicide. They praised her mastery of Shuos ideals. And, almost as an afterthought, they recommended that she be placed in two advanced seminars next term.

Cheris closed the connection and stayed in the café until it got dark. During that time, she played seven games of jeng-zai and lost them all.

No one ever figured out that Cheris was the author of Tiana’s game.