Free And the Burned Moths Remain by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

 
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    When the envoy comes, Jingfei is fighting herself in a duel to the death.
    Jackknife paths and recoil slopes extend and retract, vector-walls forming and reforming to bring the combatants now tantalizing close, now infuriating apart. The arena moves with a predator’s intelligence, its heuristic array as much participant as battlefield.
    The ground stinks of sweat and hemorrhage; neither waveform ceiling nor parabolic tiles have ever been cleaned. The stains are mortality, the weapon fragments a reminder: nothing lasts, nothing is forever. Not even, perhaps, an eternal prison sentence.
    Jingfei, and Jingfei. Two shadows of equal height, equal might, similar mass. Their weapons too are twins: swords sculpted from the leavings of the fortress itself, shed shells from velocity shadows and sloughed nacre from iteration cycles. Over the lifetimes that have layered on top of another and condensed into an unbreakable edge—sediment to diamond—Jingfei of Moth River has acquired many skills, though she chooses to neither use nor craft firearms. They are too fast, finish disputes too soon.
    The duelists climb over warped bulkhead, in which reflections of knife edges dart and flash like schools of fish. In speed the two Jingfeis are equal. In skill, in experience, in their certainty of the other’s next movement—attack and defense, parry and riposte, the idiosyncrasies of tactic and style. Beneath the carapace of their armor, under the brocade of their robes, perhaps their hearts heave to the same beat.
    They have been engaged a long time, hours smearing, swarm-light rising and setting and rising again. One slows, slips, blunted by exhaustion. The other comes down upon her, momentum and desperation and need.
    She does not find her mark—Jingfei twists away, strikes back. Their blades meet and grip, one biting down on the other.
    A tensile threshold is met. One blade shatters, a burst of shrapnel like pearls and lightning.
    Jingfel kneels, slashes across with the light, consummate ease of habit. The throat opens, aorta protesting against loss. The sand-strewn floor absorbs spilled blood, but there are always blotches left behind, like careless calligraphy.
    Jingfei falls; Jingfei rises, victorious. An audience of Jingfei roars applause from a thousand throats.
    *   *   *
    When the envoy comes, Jingfei is being decanted elsewhere in the citadel. She spills from a tank onto pale morass, raw and loose-limbed, wet hair and gurgling throat: newborn sounds and newborn-frail, though her thought and perception have accrued through years uncounted, and her arteries pulse with the strength of lifetimes multiplied. Replicants straighten and clean her, dress her in the silks and hairpins of her native land. They always make sure her clothes are extravagant, robes trimmed in the riches of defeated constituents, jeweled in the unique resources of annexed worlds. Her skin is bruised by swarm-light, striped tigerish. Cranes of metal and silicon lap up the waters of her birth. She never speaks and her motor control never develops.
    The envoy is greeted by a boy of ten and an adolescent of no particular gender. The fortress seals behind the breach of her entry, tightening the vise of its shields.
    Though the envoy arrives dragging questions like anchors and chains, existence cannot be answered in binary: on or off, alive or not. There are more than two states, and more than one may be concurrently true. Outside the swarm-fortress, Jingfei of Moth River has never been born, her past corroded and her name consigned to forgetting. Inside it, within the bounds of thorn-suns and briar-stars casting sequential dusks, Jingfei has been born a hundred times, a thousand, a million: a multitude of allotropic selves with a mind inviolate as it is divided from shell to shell, a flame passed from one wick to light the next.
    She is called the seer, the oracle, the sibyl, though not for any ability of foresight or