Debt of Light

I was fifty-two years old, thirty years in the Helios Fleet behind me, and I was floating in an airlock outside a temple, waiting for my own heartbeat to settle down enough to work the keypad.

That sounds dramatic, and it was, but let me back up. The way my career ended was simple enough, the way bad things usually are. They gave me an order at the Battle of Corrin's Reach, a strike package meant for a military relay, and the relay sat under a civilian dome with eleven thousand people breathing under the glass. I asked twice for confirmation, which is a thing you do when you already know the answer, and both times the answer came back the same, burn it. So I didn't. I pulled my ship out of the strike line and I let the dome stand, and the tribunal stripped my rank in a room so quiet I could hear the ventilation ticking.

They call it disgrace. I call it Tuesday. Well, I didn't call it that at the time, because at the time I drank too much and hated myself in a very organized way, but six years of Bradly does things to a person, good things, and somewhere along the way I started sleeping at night again.

The temple drifted below me, or I drifted above it, depending on how you feel about reference frames, a squat little station orbiting the gas giant Hesiod with its running lights blinking in a pattern I'd memorized off a courier schedule. The Temple of Refraction. Sacred mirror ceremonies, dust-dry rituals, a guild of priests who hadn't done an honest day's work since before I enlisted. They also owed a treaty debt to my old unit, the Seventeenth escort wing, four hundred retired soldiers promised sanctuary and pension after the war, and the guild had quietly voided it two years back because honoring it would cost money. Four hundred people, most of them older than me, getting their stipends clawed back over paperwork.

So yes, I was floating in their airlock with my ex-fleet gloves on and a plan I'd rehearsed in my head about ninety times.

"Still there?" Bradly's voice came through the earpiece, low and warm, the way it always is, like a man talking to you from the next room over.

"Still here," I whispered. "Hatch controls are under the service panel, just like your schematic said."

"Leona, if anything feels wrong, you call it off. I mean it. I did not patch my codes into this little adventure so I could lose you to a bunch of robe-wearing accountants."

"You patched your codes in because you love me and because you also think the guild are accountants in robes."

"I love you AND I think they're accountants in robes, that's true, both things can be true." I could hear him smiling. Bradly is forty-nine, a station engineer with forearms like dock cable and a laugh that carries, and we met on a supply run six years ago when his freighter's coolant line ruptured and I was the closest thing to a mechanic in the docking ring. He became my closest friend three months later over terrible coffee and honest questions, and I've never once regretted it. We tried being something else, once, in year two, and found out we were better at this.

I popped the service panel. His access codes were burned onto a chip tucked behind my watch strap, and I fed them in slow, one character at a time, because the station's alarm logic was old and I'd read the manuals, all of them, in the long nights before I did this. Old alarm systems care about speed and about patterns, so I gave them neither. The outer hatch sighed open in front of me and the recycled air of the temple rolled out, carrying that faint bite of ozone you get around old power conduits, and underneath it something else, something clean, like cold glass.

"Inner hatch?" Bradly asked.

"Going for it now!"

"Love you. Don't get stabbed."

"Love you too, and I've been stabbed, it's overrated."

The inner hatch took his codes fine, and then I was inside the Temple of Refraction, and it was smaller than the courier brochures made it look. Stations usually are. A short spine corridor, dim, the walls paneled in brushed metal that somebody with real devotion polished until it looked like water. There were no guards in the corridor, which worried me more than guards would have, because Jed, the custodian, has run this place for forty years and before that he served as a fleet priest for a decade, and fleet priests know watch rotations the way farmers know rain. Either he was elsewhere, or he was exactly where I couldn't see him.

I moved anyway. You don't get to thirty years in the Fleet by hesitating at every dark corner, and you don't get stripped of rank by following the manual either, so make of that what you will.

The treaty log was kept in the mirror chamber. I knew that from the guild's own filings, the arrogant idiots publish their protocol manuals like anybody cares, and the log was the whole ballgame. A treaty is only real while its record lives, that's the old law, older than the Fleet, and the guild had used a technicality to void the debt two years back. But there was a second protocol, a dirt-old one, about debts sworn before the goddess of mirrors, and if the original swearing was still recorded in the chamber's altar log, then the guild's voiding was worth about as much as wet paper. All I had to do was reach the log, copy it, and broadcast it to every pension office in the sector. No bombs. No violence. Just embarrassment and paperwork, which in my experience hurt the guild far worse.

The chamber door was unlocked. That stopped me for a second, hand flat on the panel, because nothing on a station is ever unlocked by accident, but the ceremony schedule said the guild held their rites at the top of the hour and I'd timed my breach to land in the dead middle of a quiet stretch between services, so maybe they just hadn't locked up between services. Maybe. I told myself maybe and went in.

The chamber was no bigger than a cargo pod. I mean that literally, I've slept in cargo pods with more floor space, and every surface of it, floor, ceiling, all four walls, was mirror. Not modern glass, not that thin silvered junk, but old mirror, dark mirror, the kind that shows you yourself a half beat slow, and standing in the middle of it I saw a hundred Leonas fan out around me and fold back in, all of them fifty-two years old with gray coming in at the temples, all of them looking tired and determined and just a little bit scared.

In the center of the floor stood the altar, a waist-high column of black stone, and set into its top, flat, like a coin, was the central mirror. It was maybe the size of a dinner plate and it was the only thing in the room that didn't reflect me, and I want to tell you I didn't notice that, but of course I noticed it, I'd read every manual, and the manuals say the central mirror reflects the debt, not the person, which is priest poetry for don't touch it, which is exactly the kind of warning that has never once stopped me.

The log interface was a panel on the altar's side, and it wanted an officiant's key, and I didn't have one, so I did the next best thing and pried the access cover with my belt knife, careful, slow, sweat running down inside my collar. The panel came loose. The log lit up under my fingers, old script scrolling in gold on black, and there it was, third entry from the top, the swearing of the Seventeenth, four hundred names, Leona Vass's name near the end, sworn before the mirror at the war's end.

"Got it," I breathed to Bradly. "The original oath is in the log. The whole treaty. It's real."

"Copy it and get out," he said, and I heard the smile gone out of his voice, replaced by the engineer flatness he gets when he's worried. "Copy it and get out, Leona."

I reached to pull the data lead from my belt, and my glove, my thin ex-fleet glove, snagged on the pried cover, and I overbalanced, one knee coming down on the altar rim, and my bare hand, I don't even know when the glove came off, my bare hand came down flat on the central mirror.

The mirror was warm. That was my first thought, absurdly, that it was warm like a cheek, and my second thought was that the hundred Leonas in the walls had all gone still, and my third thought never got finished, because the mirror lit up under my palm, gold on black, the same gold as the log, and a voice came out of it, out of everything, out of the walls and the floor and the air itself, a voice like a woman's and like glass ringing at the same time.

"Oh," the voice said, and it sounded the way I feel when I haven't talked to anyone in days, rusty and amazed. "Oh, hello. You're warm."

The chamber lights came up. Every mirror in the room filled at once with a figure that was not me, a tall woman made of light and reflection, silver-haired, ancient-eyed, standing in a hundred copies of herself with her head tilted, looking at my hand on her mirror the way you'd look at a cat that had just climbed into your lap uninvited.

"Well," she said. "It has been two hundred and eleven years, and the first person to touch me is a soldier with grease on her fingers." She laughed, and the sound went through the floor and up through my boots. "I am Alana. And you, little thief, are standing in the middle of a debt."

"Excuse me," I said, because what do you say to a goddess, and I tried to pull my hand off the mirror and found that I couldn't, or that I didn't try very hard, I honestly couldn't tell you which, because the mirror was warm and my hand felt like it belonged there, the way your feet belong on a deck you've stood watch on for thirty years. "I'm not a thief. I'm here to collect."

"You pried open an altar with a knife and copied my log without asking," Alana said, and she said it gently, the way you'd tease a child, and around me the hundred copies of her all tilted their heads together, silver hair swinging in perfect sync. "That's theft, little soldier. Or it's collection, depending on who won. And look, you've won. The debt has a face in my glass now."

"The Seventeenth escort wing," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which is the one trick the fleet ever taught me that stuck. "Four hundred pensions, sanctuary, sworn before this mirror at the war's end. Your priests voided it two years ago. I've got the log copied, I've got the guild's seal on the copy, and I've got a tribunal record that says what happens when people break contracts with soldiers."

"Mm," she said, and the sound went through the floor again, up my shins, into my teeth. "You rehearsed that."

"I rehearsed it in a shuttle bathroom, yes."

"I can see that." She laughed again, and the copies in the walls laughed with her, a hundred mouths, a hundred rings of light, and I swear the mirrors themselves brightened with it. "You're the first mortal to touch me in two hundred years, do you understand what that means? Emperors have died begging. Cathedrals have burned for the chance. And I get a fifty-two-year-old mechanic with a data lead in her teeth."

"I'm not a mechanic," I said. "I was fleet. Thirty years. Then they stripped me, so now I'm whatever this is."

"Leona Vass," she said, and the way she said it, my own name, reading it off some ledger older than my whole species, it went down my spine like cold water. "Sworn before the mirror. Yes. I remember your oath. Not you, of course, but the shape of your name. It's been sitting in my log for thirty years, waiting for you to come and put your hand on me. Do you know how long two hundred years is, from in here?"

"No," I said. "How long?"

"Long," she said, and for a second all the copies of her looked tired too, a hundred tired goddesses folding back into one. "Longer than your fleet. Longer than most of your treaties. Everyone I ever loved is dust, and the last thing I felt with a hand was a priestess washing the glass, which doesn't count, glass doesn't count." She looked down at my hand on her mirror, at the glove still half on my other wrist, at the pried cover and the data lead and the whole sorry mess of me. "Your hand counts."

"Okay," I said, and my mouth was dry, and my heart was doing something I'm not going to describe because you'll think I'm being poetic, but I'll tell you it wasn't fear. "Okay. Say what you want from me."

"To be touched," she said, simply, like it cost her nothing, like it wasn't the loneliest sentence I'd ever heard a person say. "Like a person. Not like an artifact. Would you do that, Leona Vass? Would you put your hands on me like I'm someone you mean it with?"

And here's the part I need you to understand, because I can hear the comments already, no, nobody was drunk, nobody was tricked, there was no compulsion in that mirror, I've been around compulsion in my life and I know what it feels like in your joints, and this wasn't it, this was a woman asking. An old, old woman, one thousand seven hundred years old by the temple records I later read, asking, after two hundred years, and leaving me completely free to say no and walk out with my log and my treaty and my fight.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I can do that. But I'm going to need, look, I've never touched a goddess. I don't know the rules."

"There are no rules," she said. "There's just me, and you, and the glass. Come here. Come properly, all the way, put your hand back where it was and lean in, I'll do the rest."

So I pulled my remaining glove off and stuck both in my belt, and put my bare palm back down flat on the dinner-plate mirror, warm as a cheek, and I leaned in like she said, and the mirror did the thing mirrors aren't supposed to do, which is take my weight. My hand went through. My arm went through, up past the wrist, and the feeling of it, God, the feeling of it was like walking into a heated pool, warm water without the wet, and then her hand closed around mine from the other side and pulled, gently, asking with the pull, and I said "yes, okay, yes," out loud like an idiot and she drew me halfway through the glass.

I don't know how to describe being halfway through a mirror. From my chest down I was still in the chamber, boots on the black stone