January was fond of ambling through life, allowing it to happen as it happened, never rushing toward her destination. In contrast, Li Qin has always been prompt, a trait I both share and admire. By the time I shook off my shock and allowed myself to dissolve into the safe embrace of the electronic branches of the network, her notes were waiting for me, glowing softly red in a file labeled “confidential.”
Cautiously, I touched its edges, testing the security settings. It was password protected and set to read-only, precautions that might stop a member of my staff, but which had never been intended to stop me. I allowed the idea of my fingers to sink deeper into the code, looking for hidden triggers and unseen traps. Li Qin would never intentionally harm me. She loved me too much for that. But she might accidentally leave a file locked down hard enough to bruise, and I wished to avoid that if I could.
The code rippled around me, allowing me to pass unhindered. My presence was the password, and I had only come to read. Altering the ritual would serve no purpose. I pulled myself farther forward, and dove into the files.
The world lurched. For a moment, it was the comforting ones and zeroes of my second infancy, when I was more child of the computer and the code than daughter of January O’Leary and Li Qin Zhou. They blurred, and I was standing in a library, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and leather-bound books. The floor was polished oak, softened by a rug patterned with hibiscus flowers and twining clematis. A fire crackled in the fireplace, only its pixelated edges betraying the virtual nature of the environment.
Closing my eyes, I cast my awareness outside my surroundings until I located the small file containing Li Qin’s description of the environment. Her code was crude, inoperable; it would never have been able to run independent of my presence. With me standing in her research, it was sufficient to shape my surroundings, tailoring them to her desires. She disliked me spending too much time in pure code. She said it allowed me to learn as a machine, and not as a Countess of the material realm.
She was right, of course, for all that I rarely allow myself to tell her so. She needed to let me make my own choices. Still, it was nice to be reminded that she cared.
“Mother,” I said fondly, and walked toward the fireplace, where a stack of files waited for me on the arm of an overstuffed chair. I sank into it, curling my virtual legs beneath myself as I opened the first of them and began to read.
It was a fairy tale, of sorts: the tale of a woman who had died and been frozen in stasis before the night-haunts could collect her body. Her lover had waited for them to arrive and, when they did, had somehow managed to strike a bargain via which they would leave their prize unclaimed, providing the woman could be restored to life within a sennight’s time. I paused to check my dictionary. A sennight was a week: an archaic term which nonetheless made perfect sense, given the endurance of the term “fortnight” among the elder purebloods. I filed it away as a useful translation, and continued to read.
The lover, granted a reprieve from the finality of death, had thrown themselves upon the mercy of the nearest blood-worker, a Daoine Sidhe renowned for their skill with a needle and a geas. Together, they had been able to somehow heal the dead woman’s wounds and trick her body into forgetting it was no longer alive, and as the night-haunts had not come for her, she had seen no reason not to open her eyes. She had returned from the dead, shrugging off its grasp as if it were nothing.
The blood-worker, exhausted, had collapsed into a sleep that lasted the better part of a decade. I somehow doubted Li Qin was intending to share that portion of the story with October. October did not seem the type to voluntarily take a multi-year nap for the sake of resurrecting a group of virtual strangers. Some of them were literal strangers. Barbara and Yui had been dead before October’s arrival.
Quentin wouldn’t like it if we put his knight to sleep for years. His displeasure was more of a concern for me than October’s inconvenience. He and I had been the same age for a time, and I was still fond of him, even if we were no longer peers. It would be unpleasant to make him that unhappy.
It was probably also unpleasant being dead while the part of you that should have become a night-haunt was trapped in a flawed computer simulation. I was confident the people in the basement would have prioritized their happiness over Quentin’s. As they were my subjects, if only on a technicality—normally, the living cannot claim authority over the dead, but normally, the living are not looking to resurrect them—I was probably expected to take their side.
I sighed, briefly glad of Li Qin’s artfully tailored environment. There is something satisfying in the act of sighing, and it is not possible in untextured code. I would have had no body there, while her virtual library made it a requirement.
I have been very fortunate in my mothers. Both of them have loved me as well and as truly as they could, and any failures in my character are my own, and not their fault at all.
The next file contained another fairy tale, this time telling the story of a brave knight, struck down in battle against a deadly foe. In this story, it was the night-haunts themselves who decided the death had been unfair, catching the knight’s vitality before it could escape them, leaving it undevoured. They went to the nearest blood-worker they could find, offering all the riches the dead could reveal if only the blood-worker would agree to perform a ritual for them, allowing the knight to return to the land of the living. Again, the blood-worker slept, for seven years and a day, eventually waking restored and richer than the sun.
I was not sure the sun possessed any signal wealth. Still, the message was clear: people could be stolen back from death, if their bodies were intact, if the night-haunts had not yet come to strip the vitality from their blood, and if a blood-worker of sufficient power was willing to pour some of their own life into the ritual.
The other files contained variations on the ritual itself, lists of herbs and flowers, sacred woods and precious stones. Some of the instructions contradicted one another, but that was an easy thing to reconcile. A ritual, like a program, can use many different tricks to accomplish the same end. If someone poured enough blood magic into the casting, it would work, and all those who possessed bodies to restore and vitality to replace would be able to wake. My part in this process, according to Li Qin’s notes, would be to guide the frozen minds of my subjects out of the machines where they were captive, back into the fleshly shells they had never intended to abandon.