Zaya is a retired former agent of a covert group known as Spiral, now living out her days as an artist and mother to twin daughters. But you know how it goes, you're never all the way out. There's always one last job. Zaya gets dragged back in to help stop a killer that used to work for Spiral, and is now targeting them. The operation runs into dual problems of the police raiding the ship, and the killer being more resilient than Spiral expected. Zaya ends up killing him inside her own (sentient) ship, while trying to escape from the cops via hyperspace.
Except when she exits hyperspace, everything is wrong. Her kids are now her sister's, and her sister claims to have no sister. No one in Spiral knows her, or how she can find her way through their secret passages and back doors. The killer is married to Zaya's sister, and starts hunting her down. It's one of those stories where the expert brought out of retirement is betrayed, except Zaya wasn't actually betrayed, she just stumbled into a parallel universe. Which leads to a bizarre bit where she's being hunted by a guy while the same guy's corpse in rotting in her ship. Nothing really ends well.
It feels a lot longer than 4 years ago I reviewed this graphic novel, but the first time I mentioned it in one of my solicits posts was in 2020. Maybe that's why. It sat on my "to buy" list for a while before I found a copy cheap enough I'd go for it. But I also thought Zaya was about a former secret agent learning things about their past, and it's not that at all. Would I have bought it if I better understood what Morvan and Huang-Jia were working towards?
It almost feels like two stories crammed together. You have the hunt for the killer in his bizarrely puffy-looking power suit - it's like he's wearing a giant airbag that's already deployed - and people with cybernetic enhancements and the ability to connect themselves to computer systems via wires plugging in at the base of their skulls. Very Ghost in the Shell.
Zaya reprograms the mind of the ship she's provided, granting it free will in the hopes it'll choose to help and not report anything to the authorities. We're told this act essentially constitutes murder with regards to the initial ship mind, but the new version is totally OK with what Zaya did. No concerns, just happy to be free! Huang-Jia marks the difference by depicting the ship's initial projection of its mind as a rigid black rectangle, a miniature version of the doorway in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After, "Lia" (the name Zaya gives the ship) looks more like a floating mass of translucent tentacles.
(Between the highly organic look Lia's mind gets, and the streamlined and sculpted design of the spaceships, the bulky design of Siegram's power suit is all the stranger. You'd almost think he stumbled in from another universe that had a whole different design aesthetic.)
Then you get the whole parallel universe thing where Zaya can't figure out what's going on, and nobody can figure her out, either. Where you see how universes apparently repeat certain patterns, just with different players involved. Zaya didn't exist, but her twins still do, via her sister and the killer guy, Siegram, who in this world apparently got Zaya's life. Recruited off the streets, trusted bodyguard, partially retired when he becomes a parent. As for the twins existing in both universes, that's because Siegram is apparently the father in both universes, it's just that in Zaya's case, Crazy Killer Siegram assaulted her in a cloakroom, while Retired Bodyguard Siegram wooed and married Carmen.
(The bit about Zaya getting assaulted is a sudden flashbulb she gets in the middle of a fistfight with Retired Bodyguard Siegram. Doesn't get much weight, more like Movran figured out late in the story he needed something to explain the twins existing in both universes despite different mothers, and that was the best he could manage.)
Also, kind of strange Lia was so excited about being free, but agrees to help Siegram take Zaya to a government agency that wants to use people who drifted in from other universes to try and explore the phenomenon. So the government can exploit it, naturally. It's a life of indentured servitude, for both of them. When Lia had interior guns that could absolutely kill Siegram. Then dump his body (and the first corpse) and just run for it. Instead, we got a distinctly unsatisfying ending.
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