Insane Squirrel

"Prisoner BT-7K4-0093-R-118-XQ-26, Ward Nine, Perpetual Hold reclassified. Your sentence of five thousand years has been fulfilled."

Her eyes fluttered open. Her mind arrived a half beat before her body did, and for one long breath she lay there listening to her own heart pick up its pace. Her fingers twitched against something smooth and cold. Her lungs pulled in air that tasted of nothing at all, neither dust nor metal nor the faint antiseptic bite she remembered from the induction chamber, and that absence bothered her more than any smell would have.

For her, the walk into the crystal had happened only minutes ago. She could still feel the grip of the guard's glove on her upper arm and hear the magistrate's clerk reading the charges in that flat, unhurried voice. Then there was nothing. There was no dream, no drifting, and no sense of time stacking up behind her. There was the clerk's voice, and then there was this.

She lay naked on a table in a white room. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were the same seamless white, without a single panel, light fixture, or door seam to break them, and the light came from everywhere at once, so that she cast no shadow on the table beneath her. Goosebumps rose along her arms and thighs. When she turned her head, the movement came slowly, her neck stiff and reluctant, and she saw a second table beside her with her belongings laid out on it in neat rows.

"Five thousand years," the voice added, as though she might have missed it the first time. Then it laughed, a short dry sound with real amusement in it. "Good luck."

She had expected to be released into a world she at least knew. A changed world, certainly. She had done the math before they put her under, and she had made her peace with outliving most of the people she cared about. But this was something else entirely, and more than anything, more than the dark or the noise or the cold that crept up through the floorboards, it was the smell.

A man stumbled into her shoulder hard enough to rock her on the stool. He did not stop or apologize. He pushed past her toward the bar, flinging one heavy arm in the direction of the barkeep at the far end of the counter, and called out something that might have been a name. It started with a G, or possibly a K, and dissolved somewhere in the middle into a long wet slur.

"'Nother round," he managed, much louder. "Need 'nother round, y'hear?"

Shade lifted her hand to cover her nose and mouth and pressed her lips together against the sudden heave in her stomach. At this distance she could pick out every layer of him: stale ale soaked into wool, the sour musk of sex, and underneath it the deep, settled reek of a man who had not washed in months, if ever. She held her breath and counted.

The barkeep, a broad, balding man with a stained apron knotted twice around his middle, looked up from the patron he had been talking to. He gave the drunk a slow nod and pointed one thick finger back toward the tables, the gesture of a man who had made it a thousand times before. Then his eyes moved to her, to her hand clamped over her face, and he gave her a short, apologetic look that was very nearly pity before he turned back to his conversation.

The drunk took the hint and began to make his way back. He managed it in stages, and two of those stages involved her. His hip caught the edge of her stool, and then his elbow found her back as he turned, and she rolled her eyes toward the soot-black rafters and waited for him to be gone.

She understood the joke now, at least. She understood the laughter in that voice.

Taius had never been what anyone would call a pristine planet. She knew its fog and its slums and the people who lived beneath both. But at least it had never been some overgrown Renaissance festival. This world had been a towering beacon of the Republic Commonwealth. She had seen it from orbit, its glass and trividium towers reaching up into the atmosphere, gleaming like beautiful jewels in the night. Now there was nothing left of it but torches, soot, and excrement. Seriously, it was everywhere. It was smeared on the boards by the door, trodden into the straw on the floor, and she suspected it was the reason the alley outside had made her eyes water. She could not begin to imagine the disease rate.

The tavern itself was a long, low room with a ceiling she could have touched if she stood on the rung of her stool. Torches burned in iron brackets along both walls, and their smoke gathered under the beams in a gray layer that never quite cleared and left the wood above them black and greasy. The tables were thick planks worn smooth in the middle and rough at the edges, and the one in front of her had a dark ring burned into it where someone had once set down a pot straight off the fire. Somewhere behind the bar, fat was spitting in a pan. The room was loud with voices, scraping benches, and a dog barking at something out in the street, and over all of it the heat of too many bodies pressed in close.

And she was stuck here. She had no ship, no networks, and not even a lightbulb to read by.

Her gaze dropped to the table in front of her, to the book, the bottle, and the single crystal glass the barkeep had set down when she first took her seat. He had leaned in close to do it and mumbled the whole story in one breath, his eyes darting between her face and the bottle.

"Been waiting on you for months, this has. Near gave up on you. Near sold it, too." He had shaken his head at the thought. "That bottle alone'd keep this place in business for years."

She reached out and ran her thumb across the label. The paper was brittle and gone brown at the corners, but the lettering was still there, and so was the small, elegant shadow mark she had chosen herself. Umbra Reserve. She remembered the afternoon she had approved this design, sitting in her office with three drafts spread across her desk, and she remembered how proud she had been of it. Now it was a five-thousand-year-old bottle of what was most likely vinegar.

She worked the stopper loose anyway. It came free with a soft, dry pop, and she poured two fingers into the crystal glass and set the bottle down beside it. The smell rose up out of the glass at once, rich and warm, dark fruit and oak and a deep sweetness that cut straight through the smoke and the sweat of the room. It was not vinegar. It smelled amazing. Two stools down, the man nearest her stopped with his own cup halfway to his mouth, turned his head, and breathed in slowly, his eyes going to her glass with open admiration.

She lifted the glass and turned it slowly in the torchlight. The crystal was heavy and clear, cut in deep facets around the base that threw small points of light across the table, and the rim was so thin she could barely feel it against her lip. It was one of her own. She was sure of it. She had had them made for her by one of the finest crystal makers on Taius, a set of twelve, and she had never once had to ask what they cost. That had been the benefit of wealth. Now that wealth was nothing more than a fleeting memory. It was not the first time she had started from nothing, but this time, somehow, it felt different.

She gathered the book under one arm, took the bottle by the neck and the glass by its base, and slid off the stool. At the far end of the room, a tiny table sat directly beneath a torch, and for some reason it was empty. It had room for one chair and not much else. She suspected it stayed empty because most of the people in here preferred the darkness. She sat down beneath the light, set the bottle and the glass on the table, and laid the bundle in front of her.

Then she turned her attention to the sheepskin.

Someone had wrapped a book in it; she could tell by the heft and the size. The wool side was turned inward against the cover, the leather side was worn soft and dark from handling, and the whole bundle was tied closed with a strip of the same hide. She untied it and folded the wrap back. Beneath it lay an old hardbound book, its corners rubbed round and its spine faded, but printed, truly printed, in a world that read by torchlight. People here dug things like this out of the ground and called them artifacts.

The cover was a painting of a lamplit study, all dark wood paneling and warm amber light from a brass sconce on the wall. A model catamaran sat on a polished desk, its twin white hulls and dark deck rendered in careful detail, and beside it a string of pearls and gold lay spilled across the wood around a large starburst pendant set with a pale stone. Across the top, in tall gold letters, was the title.

A Shady Gamble.

At the bottom, in the same gold, was the author's name. Leon Hamilton.

She read the title twice. Shady. It could have been coincidence. Then she looked at the painting again, more slowly this time, and set her glass down.

She knew that catamaran. It was hers, the model she had kept in her own study, down to the line of the twin hulls. And the necklace lying across the desk beside it, tossed there as though someone had dropped it on the way to bed, was no ordinary string of pearls. Those were the Helendigari Royal jewels. She would have known that starburst anywhere. Very few people alive had ever seen them lying next to that model, and almost none of them knew what it meant.

She sat back and looked at the name for a long moment. Leon. She had known a Leon once, back when she was still answering to Helena Cartwright, and she wondered if it could be the same man. It was a common enough name. But whoever had written this knew how Shade had been born, and she had never told Leon that story. Not once.

She picked up the glass and leaned back in the chair until it creaked and settled onto its two back legs. She set the book in her lap, swung her boots up onto the corner of the little table, and crossed them at the ankle beside the bottle. She took a slow sip. The cognac was warm all the way down, and she let out a long, contented breath and let her shoulders sink into the chair.

At the next table, a man with a scar through one eyebrow had been watching her since she sat down under the torch. He watched her a moment longer, then picked up his drink and turned his chair so that his back was to the wall instead of to her. The two men across from him had gone quiet. One of them kept glancing at her boots, then at her face, then at the door, as if he were working out how long it would take him to reach it. A woman by the hearth leaned over and whispered something to her companion, and neither of them looked her way again. No one in the room had told her to move her feet. No one had come over to ask about the bottle, either, though half the room had smelled it.

Shade ignored all of them and slid the cover open.

The inside of the cover was lined with heavy cream paper, and on the first page, beneath the title and the author's name, a small block of print gave the publisher's mark and a date. First printing, 21,576. She read it twice. Twenty-five years. Whoever Leon Hamilton was, he had written this twenty-five years after they put her in the crystal, and that had been five thousand years ago.

She turned the page.

A Foreword

For twenty years now, my readers have asked me one question more than any other. They have asked it in letters, at signings, at dinner tables, and once, memorably, at gunpoint. How did Shade begin?

I have refused to answer. I refused because I know her better than any living soul, and I know that the beginning of a legend is where all of its secrets are buried. Tell people how she began, and sooner or later someone will work out who she was. I had no wish to help them.

But she has not come back to us, and I am no longer convinced she will. So I will tell it, because I am the only one who can, and because one day someone is going to need to understand her. When that day comes, they will find this book waiting for them.

Fair warning. If you are expecting some explosive fireball of an introduction, you will be profoundly disappointed. The origin of Shade begins in a peculiarly mundane way, with a friendly game of dathalu, no less. There is no bang and no apocalyptic event, only a whisper. Mark it well.

Some of you will be surprised. Some of you will be proud. And none of you will know the truth. True legends never begin as legends. Or do they?

Leon Hamilton

Shade read the last line again and snorted softly into her glass. That was him, all right. No one else she had ever known could brag that well and still sound sincere about it.

She turned the page, and the tavern faded away.