Machine's Last Testament

Chapter One

Evening, verging on nightfall. In the sterile cleanness of Suzhen’s office there is the smell of war, familiar and earthy: soot and sweat, dried gore, sickness. Candidates are sent as is—a phrase that’s always struck her as faintly mercantile, not for people at all—to give them no time to prepare, and therefore no time to dissemble. She gazes across her desk at a man from one of the asteroid colonies, bent and parched, looking a decade older than he is. Frail from starvation, scarred from combat or abuse: no telling which. In the halfway houses and centers that accommodate refugees there is little order, and the wardens who run them aren’t known for gentleness. There are beatings, sometimes more. It is against regulation but it is nevertheless an open secret; everyone knows what goes on. There is nearly no point curbing or protesting it. Beyond her purview in any case.

She continues to study the man, his blanched skin, the dark circles under his eyes. The nose that broke and did not heal well, the colorless clothes given to all arrivals that hang on him loose and shapeless. Once she thought, entering this field, that she would be crippled by sympathy. That to all who enter she would say yes, yes, yes, you too deserve Samsara’s grace, we have so much, welcome to Anatta. But the process dehumanizes. Each person becomes a dossier, a collection of risk factors and potential to contribute, to be weighed against one another and then weighed against Bureau guidelines. And always at the back of her mind there is the quota. An agent can accept just so many in a month; any excess she would have to personally sponsor, become responsible for. Excess, even that is a measure which reduces personhood to quantity.

To be a citizen is to deserve.

Suzhen’s quota for the month is nearly over.

Even after two years in this post, she still doesn’t know how to deliver judgment. She’s tried the slow approach, gently, but that merely leads to her candidate trying to bargain—as though no is a commodity that can be haggled over, bribed into a yes. They’d tell her of their families and their tragedies, false or real, though there’s never a shortage of real ones. None ever admits to what camp wardens do to them and it is easy, she thinks, to take that as a sign nothing untoward happens in the camps. The bruises, the wounds, those could simply be a product of brawls between inmates. Inmates. She has tried to find other words but this one sticks, the official terminology. It used to be that she called them her clients, but that was absurd. She does not serve their interests. She is their enemy.

“I’m sorry,” Suzhen says, after one more nominal look at the man’s profile. Even for a colony, his home was unusually poverty-stricken before it was depopulated and annexed by a warlord. He is not particularly educated, has little to offer Anatta, has a history of misdemeanors while in detainment. Noncompliance, attempted theft of food, physically unfit for factory labor either on-planet or on Vaisravana. “I’ll have to put you on a waitlist. You can try again next month.”

Sometimes they react in fury and attack her, and they’d be taken away—truly away, cast out of Anatta. Sometimes their eyes would glitter with the hope she’s raised with the words next month. A few take it stoically. This man bursts into tears, there’s no transition between his silence and the howling that erupts; he is on the floor, hand over mouth as though he too is trying to stop the sound, but it comes through loud, uncontrollable and inconsolable. A single continuous scream, it is astonishing what the human throat is capable of, all that raw noise. It vibrates through her bones, impossibly seismic, until her temples ache. He is taken away by the pair of drones that guard her room. She doesn’t like human security. Drones use no more force than necessary.

What is it about desperation that takes away all dignity, what is it about that lack of dignity that lowers a person in her regard. What is wrong with her, she could ask of herself. Suzhen turns off the channel that links her datasphere to her work terminal. In her ear her guidance says, “Citizen, your stress indicators are elevated. You’ve been granted two hours off and may leave early.”

Very nearly she laughs. She supposes it will soon ask if she wishes to schedule a counseling session. Most selection agents have to. They receive counseling and behavioral calibration more frequently than most civil servants. For the average administrative personnel their subjects are abstract, collated into numbers, statistics. For Suzhen they are immediate, physical, hopelessly here.

Suzhen strides past the doors to her coworkers’ offices, then past the lobby where candidates wait their turns. The same smell here. Not entirely filthy, they’re screened for contagion and allowed a minimum of hygienic care, but it is not the filth that thickens in her throat like smoke. Rather it is desperation, the reek of broken things. She meets no one’s gaze. The slightest eye contact is signal: they will crowd around her, pleading, offering, grasping at her before the guards restrain them. Hungry ghosts.

On the balcony she looks down at the expanse of city, this part one of the neatest, despite the contents of the lobby she’s just left behind. Her guidance murmurs to her, suggesting destress routines, opening a submersion channel that promises deep, dreamless sleep tonight. Instead she takes out her cigarette case. Half a dozen cylinders, each prettily faceted, jewel-toned. Emerald, ruby, sapphire. She lights a green one, waits for the substances within it to cook, and takes a long inhalation. The smoke rises, inlaid with phantasmagoria, snakes and rushing jade currents. Cosmetic—it interacts with her visual implants—rather than hallucinogenic, since her guidance no longer allows her to indulge in anything stronger. Even what is in the cigarette is harmless, just sufficient to ease her nerves, lowering adrenaline and cortisol. Her jaw relaxes. She didn’t realize how hard she was grinding her teeth. By habit she hates wasting anything, a bad habit inherited from her mother and leaner times, so she extinguishes the cigarette and puts it back in its case, the butt blackened and smeared from her mouth. She tracks the trajectory of a taxi across the air, its lean segmented body gleaming in the autumn light. It is a perfect evening, crisp and filigreed, the building in which she stands and the building across a marvel of Mobius arches, honeycombed windows, curlicue balconies and inverted hanging gardens. On Anatta everything, every moment, is full of grace.

“I’m taking a walk,” she says. “Find me someplace with minimal foot traffic.”

“You ought to be home by nine, citizen,” the guidance chides, but it obliges with a list of the nearest places where she can stretch her legs. It doesn’t always. For every action it weighs the variables of her well-being, even an act as innocent as taking a walk. There was a time when it forbade her from going near any sort of bridge, high roof, or exposed balcony. There was a time when all sharp things were removed from her vicinity. Samsara’s wisdom protects every citizen, especially from themselves.

Huajing Station is quiet this time of the day, alabaster floor thinly peopled, pristine vending machines in hibernation. Refugees from the halfway houses are flown in on secure vehicles, so that citizens never have to catch sight of them on public transport. Her gaze passes over the sparse crowd and her filters notify her—citizen class prime, citizen class theta, probationary resident, citizen class prime… She looks away; it isn’t a setting she can toggle off, even outside the office. Agents from the Selection Bureau don’t enforce, but they are duty-bound to report anything amiss, the ones who do not belong, a noncitizen where they shouldn’t be. The nearest Interior Defense officer would then take over.

Her carriage is all but empty, sparing her the requirement of desultory interaction. She has been marked for asocial tendencies; her guidance has warned her of the fact more than once. Ahead of her a family has seated themselves, two spouses and one wife talking of parental application in hushed excitement. Next to them are three students, interning at a tax branch, in blue-and-white academic uniforms. They mutter about their aptitudes. At their age they will be receiving their third evaluation: the first early in life, to measure character and inclination. The second to judge academic and vocational training. The third to assign employment. Suzhen imagines what it is like to receive all three, to have that certainty of path from birth, lives laid out in a flawless map. To be called citizen from the start.

“You’ve reached your destination, citizen.” Suzhen starts, at first thinking her guidance means quite something else. But the train has simply stopped.

Stepping out of the station there is a brief moment where she’s met with bracing cold, before her clothes adapt and thermoregulate. She has configured them so she’d feel the elements, another old habit. There are no settings that would let her feel discomfort, even then. She heads up the winding, blue stairs. Each step is gently lit, and the metallic glass has more suction than it looks. Even a drunk tourist wouldn’t lose their footing. She emerges. Salt in the air. The night gleams wetly, the grid-lights limpid on the pavement.

She walks down the waterfront onto a bridge of steel cartilage and porphyry, the railings black and high as walls. Underneath, ferries speed by like jeweled sharks, loaded with commuters and travelers from Yudhishthira or Khrut. Going too fast for Suzhen’s filters to identify. She breathes more easily as she leans against the bridge, forehead against frigid glass. Perhaps she needs more than a few hours off. Her guidance would readily request a vacation on her behalf: it pesters her to take just that, every other week. A hobby, she needs one of those. A functioning social life. The stratum on the hierarchy of needs that, however omniscient, Samsara cannot entirely provide when the citizen is not willing.

On a nearby billboard, a Peace Guard feed plays. Dispatch from the frontline, lately more frequent. Footage of combat in thermosphere on one of the barren worlds that exist beyond Samsara’s governance, the domain of warlords. A Peace Guard hornet is engaging a locust formation, its aegis flaring as it dissipates enemy fire, its bulkhead platinum against the planet’s clogged atmosphere and wasteland clouds. The locust formation is quickly broken and dismembered. Their components—armored hull, pilot cradles—plunge through the atmosphere, cinderous as they fall.

This is might.

Next is a scene in a town blackened by artillery, the buildings in ruin, shattered roofs and walls lying in pieces on the russet sand. The skeletons of houses stand bared and ruddy as raw skin. Their tattered inhabitants have been herded out, lined up in the open. They are tearing up images of their masked warlord—the Comet, Suzhen recognizes from the design—and scattering the pieces to the dust-choked wind. Peace Guard soldiers watch them as they do this, soldiers who are not independent beings at all but appendages of the vast intelligence that is Samsara. Soldiers who have one purpose and one only, to abolish the warlords’ reigns and guide humanity back into the fold, the unity of Anatta.

Samsara proper appears too, in its aspect of war: a woman of brilliant crocoite and unforgiving geometry, robed in sun-gleam. Larger than life, nearly four meters in height and with the breadth to match, a figure that shines brighter and realer than any other on the ground. The proxy body has its arms extended, elegant hands held out. The civilians kneel to receive its touch, a golden finger brushing a child’s forehead, a lustrous knuckle beneath an elder’s chin. They kiss its sleeve.

This is mercy.

She watches until the end; a good citizen does not turn away. She watches and remembers a time when she thought the Warlord of the Mirror was a god. The mind of a child is a malleable construct, easily impressed by size, by the polish of boots and the sheen of gunmetal. But that was long ago, another life, before Anatta remade her and reformed her, from vocabulary down to the myelin sheath. And now she is here, she belongs; she is Samsara’s whole and entire.

Suzhen steps into her apartment; the lights come on in tide-green sheets and particulate bettas swim up to her, nuzzling her with duochrome fins. The floor is seabed-dark, soft, swallowing up her feet. What an immense space it is, her home, and how empty. She sheds her clothes as she goes, and in the shower she submits herself to near-scalding water. Cilia scrub at her back, scraping away the day, the murk of catastrophizing. “You’re not very happy, citizen,” her guidance informs her between lathers.

Interacting with the limited AI is fruitless. It is many rungs below Samsara in scope and parameters. There is no personality to it, only surveillance. “I’m good at my job,” she says. But then they all are, it is impossible to be incompetent in this position. A selection agent’s success is measured by how well they follow regulations, how their records are untarnished by failed sponsorship. For Suzhen that last is easy—to date, she’s sponsored no one. The rest is a matter of coping with the wear and tear of the position, and in that too she performs well, requiring less counseling than some. Her heart has been fortified.

In her bed, seafoam sheets and firm mattress, she slips into a simulation. The lover she’s built for herself is a product of memory and footage: a figure that looms above her in armor, face hidden behind a mask and eyes glittering like knifepoints. On occasion she’d browse through connected sessions, where the array of partners are humans cloaked in anonymous avatars. Once she participated in someone’s fantasy, with them playing the role of a halfway house inmate, her the role of a warden. Uniform and baton and tactical gloves. She’d thought this would somehow satisfy her, fix her even, but it only left her feeling dirty and nauseated. She’s tended toward solitary gratification since.

(Her guidance encourages her to seek out in-person intimacy, develop an actual relationship. Save for one exception, she roundly refuses. In the physical world, one-night assignations are difficult to anonymize, and she’s not going to get temporary body mods for strangers who might bring her home from a club. How to explain to her guidance that she cannot connect with a born Anatta citizen, those who have been class prime from their genesis within a womb-tank. She used to seek the company of other refugees, or those descended from refugees, and—again, save for one exception—found even less to build on. Few admit to being class theta or a probationary resident. Those who have transcended those miserable states are more reluctant still to confess that they were ever anything less. In the end she moved to this city, where few refugees—despite proximity to the processing centers—are settled. Better to be a thread in the velvet fabric of citizenship, better to act as though she too has always been class prime.)

The AI lover is no more sophisticated than her guidance, but specialized differently, all its heuristics devoted to learning her pleasures and preferences. In virtuality she is transported to a warship, the noises of a crew at work in the distance. The AI figure hides her from view with its long cape and hefts her up against the wall. It never takes off its armor or its helm. A warlord image, rendered safe by artifice, far softer and gentler than the genuine articles could possibly be, and far more obliging. A knee parts her thighs, a hand works between her legs. She is veiled from the imaginary crew; she pretends to stifle her sounds, moaning into the AI lover’s gauntlet and clinging to its waist. She grips its angular jaw with one hand, imagining that under the mask is a woman’s face of surpassing exquisiteness, a full red mouth.

Orgasm is swift, uncomplicated, even if afterward it leaves her faintly dissatisfied. The lack of a weight indenting her bed save her own, the absence of a person waking up next to her in the morning. But the sensory links satisfy her skin hunger, if only just.

Suzhen sleeps for seven uninterrupted hours, her optimal amount of rest. Ninety minutes to spare before she has to leave for work. She brushes her teeth, cleans, dresses. In the living room, she raises her eye to the altar, a small shelf high up with a cup of offerings and an image of her mother Xinfei. A snapshot taken long before her passing: this was her at fifty-seven, newly arrived on Anatta, body lean from difficult voyages and gaze heavy with the weight of survival. Suzhen used to cry every moment she could find the energy, unable to grasp why she was ripped from the life she knew and forced into one of stunning misery. She’d spent much of their journey here in suspension, curled inside a pod, and each waking would introduce her to a new terror.

“Good morning, Mother,” she says as she changes out the offerings—glutinous rice dusted in gold leaf—for a fresh dish of oranges and a sprig of cherry blossom. Another point that makes her appreciate living alone. The altar, her mother: neither of them is something she wants to explain to a born-citizen partner or even temporary bedmate. Never explaining anything, never admitting, is the path of the least resistance but also the least pain.

She draws her coat around herself unnecessarily as she exits her building’s lobby. The morning, like the morning preceding it, is as flawless as AI synthesis. The weather is orderly, compliant with the forecast. The climate grids never malfunction, as far as Suzhen knows. On Anatta the rain falls when it is required, snow and sleet when it is the least inconvenient and the most scenic. Her feet glide along the pearly footpath. Not a single flagstone is out of place; a cluster of maintenance drones whir past, scrubbing and polishing as they go. Manicured trees rise to a uniform height, spaced at every eight meters, dripping spindly leaves the color of blood and candlelight. A few extend oblong fruits, matte black and rich, available for any passersby to partake. She doesn’t—the color makes her think of frostbitten skin, epidermis so charred it no longer looks part of a human but instead a piece of earth. So easy for flesh to become that on remote stations, the near-abandoned stops her mother had to make on the way to Anatta. Suzhen remembers other refugees who had even less than she and Xinfei did.

She does her best to forget the association of fruit and frostbite. Small things remind, invoking the neural pathways years of readjustments and counselors haven’t been able to defuse.

Suzhen is about to board the train when her guidance says, in a voice quite unlike itself, “Agent Suzhen Tang, your presence is requested in House Penumbra Zero-Seventeen.”

Her feet click, juddering, against the smooth floor. She looks down at her reflection, a hazy blot on the tiles. She stands absolutely still while her throat closes and her stomach plunges, her pulse stepping up triple-time. Sometimes she thinks, when this happens, that her skin and organs would succumb to gravity and fall away, independent, leaving the rest of her behind. There she would stand, rooted to the spot, a frame of hollow torso and bones stripped of meat.

Ever since she left one, she has never been to a halfway house. Not to visit, as selection agents can opt to do in a pretense of humanitarian interest. Not to pass by and gawk, as though refugees are zoo exhibits. There are two halfway houses in this city, Penumbra Zero-Seventeen and Antumbra One-Eighty. The former holds candidates that have been judged high-caliber, the ones with no infraction on their profiles, the ones with high potential for integration.

Perhaps it is routine.

She calls a taxi. It floats down, dragonfly body unfurling, gossamer doors shuddering open. Chassis opacity toggles to full once she’s inside. “House Penumbra Zero-Seventeen,” she says in a flat, remote voice.

From afar the compound looks pleasant, situated in Indriya’s outskirts and cupped in the palm of a sculpted hill. A civilized purgatory, much kinder-looking than the one that kept her and her mother all those decades ago. As her taxi descends, it becomes evident that Penumbra is built into the hill so that the land itself imprisons the compound, clutching it in a grip of earth and stone and grass. There are no windows and, from the outside, just one door.

A warden receives her, conducting her straight from the vestibule to a small waiting room: she does not get so much as a glimpse of the inmates. The warden is dark, late seventies and plump, and though she’s in uniform—that deep green found at the bottom of a pond—there is to her an odd discomfort, as though she’s not used to wearing it, to bearing arms. “We’ve got a particular candidate,” the warden is saying, “and most agents have reached their quota this month.”

So they have. So has she. She wonders at the warden’s point. None is forthcoming: instead the warden disappears, presumably to fetch the particular candidate. Suzhen leans back in the tight, uncomfortable chair, and glances at the leaded pane which looks out to and displays nothing. Because she has to, she listens and strains her ears. Silence. The walls are entirely soundproof to ensure solitude. It was like this for her, too, existing within a table of time precisely allotted. This many minutes for a meal, this many hours for sleep, all in complete isolation. Not even permitted her mother’s company. Afterward, she learned that there was a possibility she might have been adopted by Anatta parents to ease assimilation. Only by an agent’s capricious mercy and outside intervention did she leave the house with her mother. Two months in the halfway house and she’d have done anything to return to the camp, where she slept curled in her mother’s arms, where she had others to speak to—a place where she’d still thought herself a person.

It is such a small room, the lighting an anemic silver: the chair, the table and the floor are clean but empty. A halfway house does not receive guests. It receives inspectors and inmates: this is not a human place. And now she is on the other side of it, as despicably unhuman as the rest.

The door slides. The warden precedes; behind her follows a figure in an inmate’s shapeless smock. At the warden’s instruction, the inmate steps forward.

They stand nearly two meters tall, broad-shouldered and pale-skinned. This person’s eyes are alert, taking in Suzhen, a new variable that must at once be incorporated into the formula of survival. Calculation done at the velocity of machines, or feral things. Their long arms and shins are bruised by restraints, injection sites puckered like slag. Late forties or newly fifty, Suzhen judges, though the camps make people look much older than they are.

“This is Ovuha,” the warden says. No last name. No refugee has one—in the camps they are stripped of their past, rendered a blank canvas on which Samsara may write. “I’ve sent you her profile, Agent.”

Suzhen holds Ovuha’s gaze. The refugee is gaunt, cheeks recessed and skin taut, and yet she recognizes that either Ovuha was born of fortunate genes or she was tailored with no expenses spared—such options are available even in the colonies. The columnal neck the hue of fresh ivory, the wide generous mouth the shade of pomegranates, the cut-glass jawline as accentuated as statuary. Someone pored over her projected phenotype, going over the shape of skull and the scope of brow, the cartilage that would make up the nose and the ears. Each angle was deliberated upon to ensure elegance. Malnourished and haggard as she is, still Ovuha would stand out as a product of polished genesis.

“Hello, Ovuha,” Suzhen says. “Please, sit.”

Ovuha does. Her hands fold on the table rather than in her lap and her gaze is steady, direct without being confrontational. She says nothing and it occurs to Suzhen that she will remain silent until prompted: that is a habit any refugee learns. Never speak until spoken to. Any utterance may be used against you.

The woman’s file says she came from a world called Gurudah, held by the Warlord of the Comet. She has incurred no infraction—not even one—either in the camps or in Penumbra, having answered neither provocation from wardens or other inmates. Her physical condition is exceptional, apparently from hard labor: her interviews indicate she used to work as a colony technician and agricultural supervisor. Evaluations show that her knowledge bases, specialized and general, match that assertion. This is a star candidate. “Warden,” Suzhen says, “would you mind leaving her to me?”

They are left alone, if monitored. Suzhen’s guidance is providing her with interview routines, the questions she could ask to break the ice and begin the interrogation—why do you want to be here, what do you see yourself giving to Anatta, why do you want to become part of this world, do you know the prime directive of Samsara. Cicatrices pock Ovuha’s collarbones and throat, sites of implants that have long since been removed and left to badly scar. Scans have detected no neural links or augmentations left on Ovuha, who likely bargained those away for covert passage on a series of ships. First material belongings, then body parts. Many arrive here missing kidneys, lungs, limbs.

“Tell me something.” This is not part of the Bureau-mandated script; Suzhen rarely follows those. “Pretend we are strangers at a chance meeting, waiting for the same train. It’s running late. That doesn’t happen much, and we’ve got time to kill.”

Ovuha regards her for a few seconds, the corners of her mouth lifting. “In a bid to be interesting, I’d ask, Do you know anything about hawks? I might show you this scar on my wrist—” She lifts her wrist, turns it. There is a scar, one among many on her body, that looks to have been the result of deep laceration. “Then I’d tell you a story of how I was too stubborn to let my mentor handle this one bird. I was determined to walk it that day, even though the poor animal was too new, too nervous, and it kept digging and digging in. Talons can do a lot of damage to human skin.”

The refugee’s voice has a smooth cadence, her Putonghua melodious. It’s not an accent Suzhen has ever heard and it is effortless, as though Ovuha often spoke it in her place of nativity. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, you were going to start with what hawks are like, the basics.”

“Of course. They’re some of the most difficult creatures to tame—a little like people. My first was the bitterest animal I’d ever seen; it hated me so viscerally, like my existence was this terrible injury, this mortal insult. When you look into its eyes, it’s easy to forget you’re both bigger and stronger. All that evolution as predator works in a hawk’s favor. The inside of their mouths! Such monsters. They almost don’t have any concept of fear. In that, nothing like people.”

She wonders if Ovuha has rehearsed this, though she can’t imagine any refugee planning to entertain a selection agent with anecdotes and factoids about hawks. “Are you more like a hawk, or like a person?”

“I would point to my shoes to show that I haven’t any talons. No wings or beaks. Yes, I believe I’m most like a person, if I am like anything.”

What a surprise, Suzhen thinks, that Ovuha has such a pristine record. It’s not that she is sarcastic or insolent, but Suzhen would have thought someone like this would anger a warden almost at first sight. The natural comportment, the lack of submission. This is a person who acts as if she’s not gone through the camps, a person whose dignity is preternaturally intact. The strength of feeling that seizes Suzhen jolts her. It is not admiration; it is fury that freezes her blood and thickens her gullet, irrational and cardiac. “And how is a hawk tamed?” How calm she can make her voice.

Ovuha tilts her head. “When it is captured, the hawk catastrophizes and prepares for the worst. In this moment of terror its brain resets, becomes a blank state on which the trainer may etch new neural connections, new associations. The hawk is exposed to sensory overload. It is starved and deprived of rest. It is shocked into obedience, and it learns to fear something as innocuous as a glove. After, you’ll have a beast of a time flying the bird, and every occasion you let it off the creance is a gamble. Will it return in submission, or will it overcome the terror you’ve taught it at last and flee? But for the most part this method works, and it is favored for speed. It is true: there’s much more alike between hawk and human than I made it out, and I haven’t been consistent. And so you, a stranger I’ve met at a train platform and whose bench I’m sharing, have caught me out on falconry.”

Is this true submission, Suzhen wonders, or just a gesture at contrition. Ovuha knows she’s displeased the selection agent but she is, still, not obeisant. As quickly as it came, Suzhen’s rage dissipates. In its place, a nebulous thing that’s nearly like relief. Her breath evens. Something inside her loosens. “You’re very odd, Ovuha. But I’ll sponsor you. For the next six months I will be your caseworker and you a probationary resident. I trust you will work hard and not let me down. Welcome to Anatta.”

Finally, to say that.

Chapter Two

“Good morning, citizen. Today you have scheduled an orientation with Potentiate Ovuha at ten thirty. She has been chipped and awaits you at House Penumbra, and her assigned residence is at the Jasmine. For the next seven days you are released from your duties at the Bureau, and you may request more time as required to optimize your potentiate.”

Suzhen lies in her bed, staring up at the soothing waveforms that run across her ceiling, their dawn-gray lightening to match the morning. Silver transmuting to faded bruise. She browses through the guidelines of what she is supposed to do with a potentiate, not that she hasn’t perused them many times to the point of fixation. There is always that fantasy she’s harbored, of showing compassion as she has been—only no, that is wrong; when it was their turn the agent gave them nothing and it was her mother who wrung survival out of stone, who carved so much out of so vanishingly little. “I’m going to arrange her finances,” she says aloud, though the rest of her wishes nothing more than to stay in bed. “Then I’m taking her to shop for clothes and toiletries.”

At home her guidance manifests as a dollish creature the size of her hand. Its fox face, an inverted isosceles, regards her with cool patience. “The potentiate will need to prepare for her first test, citizen.”

“I’ll drill her on civic duties soon enough.” Toiletries, clothes, accessories, the essentials of personhood. To own things—the frivolities most of all—is to feel human. Especially after that long in detainment, though Ovuha’s file does indicate she’s been in the camp for only a couple months, in Penumbra for one. Three months in total, the fastest she’s ever seen any candidate get out and permitted into civilization. Even then, three months in limbo, stripped of name and belongings and wants. She thinks of what Ovuha said about the taming of a hawk.

She has her guidance and house drone to prepare an outfit, instructing it for semi-formal, slightly showy. When she’s done eating breakfast, she comes back to her room to see a high-necked dress, the upper half a complex honeycomb, the lower half a narrow skirt that stops at her knee on one side and drapes over her ankle on the other. It suffices. She turns to her cosmetics and animated tattoos, and has the wall project her face. Bronze glaze for her eyelids, a fluttering rose-gold flower on her right cheek, foiled-platinum eyelash extensions. She continues until her cheeks are nearly as sculpted as her guidance’s, her nose as sharp as a blade.

This time Ovuha is waiting for her in Penumbra’s lobby, a larger, airier space than the interview cell. A different warden and two guard drones flank her. They’ve put Ovuha in slightly less ugly clothes, though still gray, and there is a patch of inflamed skin on her left shoulder. The site where the tracker went in, there to monitor everything she does for her probationary period. Where she goes, what she eats, how many hours a night she sleeps. There the tracker will remain for the next six to twelve months.

“You have been granted a stipend, by the grace of Samsara,” Suzhen says as they leave Penumbra behind, and names the figure.

Ovuha looks over her shoulder, once, at the halfway house. The prison. Her expression is bland and no frisson of emotion disturbs it, no relief as having been liberated, no seizing terror at knowing she might be sent back here any time. “It must be very generous, though I don’t know enough what that’d buy. We don’t get updates on exchange rates, out there.”

It is not in fact generous, and far below any citizen’s guaranteed income. “Housing will be provided for you. The stipend will cover power, food, utilities. I’ll help you set up an account—it’ll be linked to mine, and I’ll be able to see all your transactions so keep that in mind—and after that, we should get you certified for any skills you have got. The sooner we can get you employed, the better.”

Her charge looks out the window as the taxi lifts off; she doesn’t seem awestruck or even impressed by the architecture of Gweilan District, the concentric circles that make up its center, the petal-thoroughfares that radiate outward. Every curve and circumference have been accounted for, the interaction of this spiral building with the slant of that walkway. Windows are angled to catch and hold the sunray so that every skyscraper has the fire of black opals. Each city has its own gemstone, its own language of elegance. Ovuha turns back to Suzhen. “You’re very brisk and efficient.”

“I’m a bureaucrat.”

At this Ovuha laughs, a low thrum. “Not the first quality one associates with bureaucrats, efficiency.”

“I didn’t imagine bureaucrats were much in evidence in the colonies.”

A strange expression passes over Ovuha’s features. “The colonies. I’m still not used to them being called that. We call them countries, if we call them anything. And anywhere there is human society there is bureaucracy. We create rules, and rules convolute, and there must be a steward to make sense of them.”

She knows, of course, that they don’t call themselves colonies. Those barren, broken worlds. The settlements that abide under heavy shielding, insulated against killing gases and lethal organisms, or rotting stations orbiting a dead planet. Terraforming is an ancient dream, as extinct as humanity’s predecessors. Suzhen does not apologize or correct herself over the colonies. “Your skillsets, then. Much of what you can do, we automate on Anatta. Some of your technical expertise might transfer well here, pending certification. You’ve got skill with heavy machinery and—cartography and linguistics?” A surprise, but the colonies are not without their stratification, their fine education. “Those are interesting, and could have academic uses; your contribution potential is good there. Until we can come to something better, you could look into service work. Pricier establishments use human staff. Demanding but the money’s fair, I hear, as long as you pass the training. I’ll put together a list of options and we’ll work through them together.”

Ovuha remains quiet as they enter the commercial block, a series of spheres nested against one another, the shops clinging to the inside of each sphere. Advertisements from confectioners and ateliers pulsate on the corridors, steps of concourse lighting up and inviting shoppers to sample the latest in fashion, perfume, tableware. Fragrances pursue them in clouds, cinnamon and passionfruit, spiced grape and peach wine. Those with wealth wear it on their hair, curls of circuitry and synthetic ivory, tortoiseshell notations dangling from their ears. Some wear it more subtly, in luster lining the hollows of throat or temples, tasteful but muted body mods—scales strategically scattered, nacreous hairline, void-pearl earlobes.

Suzhen watches Ovuha observe; once more there is a lack. Neither awe nor any admission that this is novel, full of extravagance she could never imagine where she came from. She wonders, faintly, if Ovuha would have reacted differently if they’d gone to one of the utilitarian outlets. Extruded products, automaton service. It is not that she means to impress her charge—or she does, she concedes to herself, the vicious part that wants to witness Ovuha’s brittleness, evidence that this person is more than her perfect candidate score, her unshakable poise.

They slip into a boutique. The clothes come in preconfigured sets, though for a little extra, modular pieces can be purchased and assembled into custom outfits. An attendant greets them, and if Ovuha’s status is obvious to them—the inmate’s rags—they pass no remark. Once Suzhen has established that Ovuha is the one in need of clothes, the attendant turns one of the mannequins into an image of Ovuha. Inevitably it is more glamorous than the real thing, looking better-fed and groomed, pores smoothed over by cosmetics. A coquettish tilt of the head, fingertips coyly touching the chin, a red smile that shows perfect teeth. Ovuha stares at the mannequin and says to Suzhen in a low voice, “Should I be able to afford this?”

“It’ll come out of my salary, so yes. Tell them you need a couple professional outfits.”

Ovuha gives her a startled look, but the attendant is already pulling her away to take measurements. They leave with pleated high-collared shirts, jackets with slashed sleeves and titanium thread, angular trousers. Ovuha runs her hand down the fabric, touching lightly, in something that at last resembles wonder.

They eat on the observation deck, in a restaurant where each table has its own partition and privacy filter. The table is smoky quartz and the window gives a clear, uninterrupted view of Samsara’s order: the climate grid high overhead, yielding slow rain. A city crow perches on the ledge outside, seeking shelter. Ovuha cants toward it, watching it with interest, meeting its black-pearl gaze. “Birds have perfect parallax vision,” she says, as though it is the beginning or continuation of a conversation, but she stops there.

The food arrives. A pot of chrysanthemum tea for them both. Suzhen’s pan-fried dumplings, stuffed with chives and meat. Ovuha’s noodle soup, wiry yellow coils in thick broth, dusted in spring onion and shredded pork. Good comfort food, Suzhen would say, but also the cheapest dish on the menu, meant to cost Suzhen as little as possible. Ovuha savors each spoonful, sipping the broth quietly but deliberately; she is making every mouthful last, inhaling the steam, letting the noodle sit on her tongue.

(Suzhen remembers this: the first taste of real food after exiting a halfway house. A steamed bun. Even now that memory remains in total clarity, the soft texture of the dough, the rich sweetness of the lotus-seed paste, the punch of salt in the yolk. She wept as she ate.)

Over dessert—she leaves Ovuha the lion’s share of the steamed cake—she opens a remote link to configure Ovuha’s account for social, financial, and security uses. Because Ovuha has no active neural link at all, the tracker being the only online component on her, she will need an external device. Suzhen opens the kit that’s standard-issue for a potentiate, takes out the slim portable and synchronizes it. She hands this to Ovuha. “This is worn on the wrist. You won’t need help learning to use this, I expect.”

“I do need to learn a great many things, officer. Only I do not wish to impose so much on you, over and over.” Ovuha does not leave crumbs. There is refinement to the motion of her fingers, even in handling food. Those tapered, callused fingers which belong to a laborer, a technician.

Despite herself, Suzhen speculates: who this woman was before, what advantages she possessed, what gave her these manners and this confidence. Not that status in the colonies means anything once the person is on Anatta, reduced, pared down to Bureau quantification. Previous wealth, previous position, all that is wiped out. The process of asylum equalizes. “I’m your caseworker. Whether or not you like it, I’ll be spending most of my time with you for half a year. Less if you can become independent before then.”

Ovuha blinks at her slowly. “I said only what I meant. What you do is above and beyond. I do not know how it is that I may repay you, as the rodent does not know how to repay an elephant.”

Ovuha’s register has grown more formal as she speaks until it reaches that, a proverb, her language turning as calligraphic as a painting. Again Suzhen’s temper flares. She tamps it down. How stupid, how petty. There is nothing in this foreign woman, this finely made creature, that should provoke her. She is not a warden, she is not one of those sadists. Taking her trauma out on a potentiate will not ease her past, will not undo her own injury. “What I am doing is my job. Your integration as a citizen who can serve Samsara is my duty and priority.”

“Purpose shapes what we are. To perform none is to forfeit one’s place in the human order.” Ovuha polishes off the last of the cake. “The subtleties and contours of it all pale before that stark truth, don’t they?”

The partition around them parts; the privacy filter toggles off. The restaurant’s air turns to fragrant gold and the fresh dew of a new day. Song fills the deck, silencing public feeds, suffusing both the restaurant’s physical space and each citizen’s personal datasphere. This is not a normal broadcast. It is Samsara, the deific force, the supreme intelligence. That which encompasses.

The AI has chosen to manifest as a projected image, city-vast, a presence of sheer scale. Behind its landscape body a single banner flies, one that Suzhen has seen before, if not as familiar to her as the Mirror. A lattice of thornworks, pointed inward to itself, the outside a smooth hexagon. Sigil of one of the greatest wasteland rulers, the commander whose armada is said to be numberless, the one general whose force could breach the sanctity of Anatta. The Warlord of the Thorn.

Behind Samsara, the banner burns, crisping to soot at the edges.

When Samsara speaks, its voice is petal-sweet. “Long ago the great architects created me with one purpose: to serve and protect humanity from the wounds it seeks to inflict upon itself, to kill the seeds of its self-destruction before they can flower. To guide you onto a path of peace is my greatest duty. Today another wall before my prime directive falls. The Warlord of the Thorn has been vanquished and humankind is one step closer to unity. The wild dominions will soon end and all of Anatta’s children will be returned to their rightful cradle.”

Diners and servers alike stop what they are doing; glasses and cutlery are put down in sudden chorus, and as one they break into applause that vibrates through the deck, an avalanche of voices and clapping hands and stamping feet. Outside the window Samsara too declares this victory, its image laying ownership to the sky, the burning banner crumbling to ashes in its hands. There is no footage of the warlord’s death or capture, a figure in armor lying in blood and smoke perhaps, but later there will be. There must always be clear, undeniable evidence, a grotesquerie of twisted limbs and melted helm. But not now, in the moment of divine communion. The facts and figures, how subjects of the Thorn will be dealt with, those too will come in time—the mundane things, the moving parts that would dilute the grand statement.

The high spirit goes on. Other tables call for liquor, a server arrives to say everything is on the house. For politeness Suzhen asks for a tigersmoke cocktail. Ovuha demurs. When the waiter is gone Ovuha’s hand convulses on the table, her knuckles white. She breathes deeply, in, out. In a few minutes she steadies herself. Her neck is rigid, her expression wiped clean of feeling.

Suzhen sips her tigersmoke when it comes. The whirligig glass is captivatingly pretty and the taste of the cocktail is just right, laced with rose salt and gentle stimulants, a marvel of flavor notes. She thinks to ask whether the Thorn was Ovuha’s warlord, whether Ovuha was ever required to tear an image to shreds, but she does not.

Here it is. Ovuha as breakable as anyone.

Taheen’s gallery sprawls across a terrace that stretches over the largest lake in Huajing District. Being here gives the impression of floating, the floor as translucent as jellyfishes and seemingly as unmoored. There is no human help. The units that assist Taheen are creatures with faceted faces, mouthless and spindly-limbed, with semi-precious gemstone eyes: spinels and rutiles, turquoises and aquamarines. Taheen has affectionately named each after its stone.

Mannequins line the windows, seated and standing, lying on their side or their back. A few stretch in croisé devant, though what they wear has nothing to do with ballet. Every shape is modeled, the statuesque and the squat, tapering and flaring torsos, thin and bulky limbs, and no two outfits are alike. One mannequin wears a waterfall bodice, the left sleeve slender and piscine, the right broad and draconic. The next is dressed in frosted glass and ceramic shards; the next still is in a brocade of jagged granite, gray slashed through with obsidian. There is a propensity for sharp things, as though the outfits are meant to wound the wearer and then dispose of themselves when that purpose has been fulfilled—assassination by haute couture.

Most expect Taheen to be narrowly made, cadaverous, but they’re broad and plump. Today they leave their heavy breasts bare, painted in animated calligraphy that has been scripted against cohesion: it is always gibberish that moves across fat and muscle and amber skin. Gorgeous gibberish, cascades of fragmented code and kaleidoscope poetry.

“You invest too easily,” they are saying as they light up. A ruby cigarette. This has a much deeper aroma than those they give Suzhen, oodh and sandalwood, a hint of camphor. Spumes of bladed phantoms rise. “Is the refugee—sorry, the potentiate—pretty to look at?”

“That’s a repulsive thing to ask, Taheen.” Suzhen picks at the dessert one of the automata has brought. Chiseled ice pastry on the outside, molten egg yolk on the inside, salt-sweet. It is peculiar, slightly unpleasant, as all gourmet inventions seem to be. “I don’t ever look at any of them that way. And I should say that you invest nothing at all.”

They laugh around the cigarette, the cylinder effortlessly clasped in their mouth. “Why, how should I invest myself? Donate my income? Your Bureau neither needs nor accepts it, my delightful friend; Samsara provides. You’ve misplaced yourself, you know.”

“I’ve got more paid vacation time than I could ever need.” This is an argument the two of them have had many times. It is rote. Still they continue to have it, insist on it, this routine between them as tried as breathing.

“Yes, yes, paid vacation. Very nice.” Taheen takes a long drag of the cigarette. The smoke they exhale is tinged red, strands of asymmetric helices. “Changing the system from the inside never works out, Suzhen. What happens is you become part of it, another function in the system, while nothing changes at all. You really could be putting your time elsewhere. It bothers me that you don’t sing anymore.”

Another component. Another function. This point Suzhen never responds to, on account of having no answer for it. To admit they are right is defeat, to refute it impossible. “How does designing dresses affect systems?”

“It doesn’t,” they say, laughing again. “But I’ve never set out to do any such thing. I’m not a political person and don’t pretend to be. What I want to do is create exquisite costumes to put on exquisite bodies. Listen, I met an actor. She’s fantastic at what she does and terribly your type, artistically and personally. Why don’t I set up an introduction?”

“I’m busy.” In her ear the guidance pushes her to accept.

“Nonsense. I’m calling her. Hold on.”

Taheen disappears into their backroom, leaving her alone with the mannequins, the excess of fabric and the gemstone assistants. Aquamarine approaches, asking if she’d like a smoke or something to drink. They all speak with variations on a single voice, the voice of Taheen’s parent. Suzhen knows this because they sat in the same selection lobby, the only two children there at the time. Taheen was orphaned much sooner than she, left to fend for themselves while still probationary, then adopted by an eccentric painter. Taheen doesn’t speak much of those years, and Suzhen expects there is a reason the automata do not speak with the painter’s voice. They are the only fellow ex-potentiate she has stayed in touch with. Someone to whom she can speak openly because there is no need to hide the fact of her history.

(Not that they share with each other which wasteland world they were from, what their parents used to do, who they used to be; whether they left family or friends behind, inasmuch as children remember those. Neither she nor Taheen shares whether their world or station was conquered by the Peace Guard first or if their parents preemptively fled. But otherwise, openly.)

When Taheen returns, it is with a triumphant smirk. “I’ve arranged it. There will be a play and this actress is the lead. Seats are sold out, but what do I care for rules? You’ll make time for it, yes?”

“You know I would because it’s you doing the asking. But I’d rather watch you make clothes.”

They click their tongue. “Yes, I’m phenomenal and so are my designs, but you need people. My clothes don’t talk. My drones don’t count.”

She stares at Rutile, at its glittering gaze and the bland sweetness of its countenance. “Don’t they? But they’re lovely.” As lovely as Taheen, though she has never been able to say that, somehow; it seems like belaboring the obvious—the way it would be to say the sun is bright or that dharma is righteous.

“You’re looking sad again. I do hate that.” They sit by her, patting their lap. “I’ll distract you and then you can go have a proper social outing. Come here.”

Suzhen does. It is comfort offered, and she has never been able to turn that away, not from Taheen. Rather the opposite. This is what she hungers for, her only vice. The lines of their body are long and patrician, and she falls into them as a puzzle-piece might fall into its slot: such is the force of habit, of attraction. They kiss her gently, they have always been careful as though they believe she is sugar and fired earth, prone to cracking or dissolving at the slightest pressure. She has never dissuaded them, has never admitted she wants more force. That they would do this for her is boon enough, a benison of touch that holds—for a time—the weight of her past at bay. An aegis, a prayer, an act close to holy.

Taheen smells of lemongrass. A scent she’s come to associate with good sex, the best sex.

Between their thumb and forefinger they roll one of her nipples, and lick down across her collarbones. She cups their breast in turn, kneading, then plunging her hand down to undo their jeweled sarong. In nudity Taheen is a vision. On Anatta, citizens are entitled to the body of their desire, skeleton and flesh and features answering precisely to individual needs and wants. Whether Taheen has received modification she will never know—and she will not ask—but she’s always thought the shape of them is god-made, divinely mandated. That glorious expanse of hips, those wide thighs hardened from exercise, which she kisses and licks and worships. More animated calligraphy shimmers around their knees, scrolling round and round, distorting and warping into golden shadows.

Her eyes clench shut as they sip sweat off her throat, her nipples. When they enter her it is slow and impossibly tender, and she responds as she ever does, wrapping her limbs around them and moving with them: two tides in concert.

Much better than the virtual lover, the simple AI. Much better than anyone else she’s ever been with: they have the spark, the element that is missing from any other, the fire that ignites her own. For a time they lie entangled, Taheen still deep in her. Musk in the air. Suzhen breathes deep and knows that she cannot have this person, not beyond the physical—they are star-fire and she is clay. This is a favor, an obligation, done for whatever reason that prevents Taheen from dismissing her as a failed social appendage and at last casting her aside. But they are so solid against her that she does not want to think of that, not now, not yet. After a union like this, she wants to whisper her gratitude like prayer. Except that would break the delicate equilibrium between the two of them. Taheen would not brook her thanks, might even be embarrassed by it.

They separate. Taheen lets her stay in the circle of their arms a little longer and she nestles her cheek against the curve of their throat.

“My clients would never expect me to do anything so vulgar right in the gallery,” they murmur. Their chuckle travels down, vibrating against her jaw. “They think I treat this place like a temple. I let them—it’s more amusing.”

She wants, desperately, to keep them here. To remain against the soft-hard planes of their flesh, to join them in the sheets. “It’s a good thing you don’t have human help to walk in on such activities.” Which they must do with plenty others: she knows for a fact that at any time, they have four to five lovers, occasionally several at once in bed. Most, she imagines, do not have her baggage.

Taheen rises, eventually: they have a project to complete. They’ve never asked her to stay the night and she has taken the hint. If there is anything she has learned on Anatta, it is to take what she’s given and ask for no more. She pushes herself upright. The drone assistants have discreetly disappeared, did not stay to spectate.

Suzhen turns to the news, for the same reason she might scratch at a scab, push at an aching tooth. There, the facts and the figures. How much incoming population they can expect from the Thorn’s newly liberated subjects, how off-world facilities have been prepared to hold them—most on satellites, a few on more distant outposts. This will be the largest influx of asylum seekers in Suzhen’s lifetime—she checks Bureau statistics and finds that it will be the largest influx period. And if the Thorn’s fall means inevitable defeat of the other remaining warlord, if that means more displaced populations…

Is it any of her problem, she thinks, when she is no more than a cog. She is not one of Samsara’s chosen administrators, she does not make or modify policy. Her history is what it is: commonplace, dull. It does not empower her or even equip her to do her work better. It does not let her do good. There are regulations, there is process, and she follows them like any other.

Perhaps Taheen is right; perhaps after Ovuha, she should consider a career change.

On the news a human officer comes on, a man with a crooked snub nose, dressed in Interior Defense black. In a tone of complete piety, he announces that every last civilian freed from the Thorn’s dominion will be made welcome, that the doors of benediction will be thrown wide. A lie, but Suzhen never expects more.

Chapter Three

There is a solid delay between Suzhen ringing the door and Ovuha answering it. Ovuha is in—she can track the potentiate’s location in real time. She could simply override the door, but she opts not to. The access she commands to Ovuha’s existence is comprehensive. No point salting the wound.

She waits. A sound of something fragile breaking, down the corridor. Domestic disputes are not uncommon in these places and the walls are not soundproof. Growing up she came to regard the noise as ambient, inevitable. Crying, adult or child. Screaming toddlers. On occasion it spills into the hallway: tearful husbands in disarray, adolescent children storming out, flights of dinnerware. The lives here are both slow—waiting out the probation period, waiting for the next caseworker visit, waiting—and fraught, existence teetering on a cusp, uncertain and unstable. Probationary residency can be snatched away at any time, or so it feels. The state stipend is sufficient but only in the barest of ways, calculated for a definition of enough that leaves no room for food that tastes like food, clothes that make one feel human. This complex is called the Jasmine, a name she finds repulsive in its euphemism, named after a pretty and fragrant flower when the truth of such housing is anything but.

The door opens. Ovuha steps back, her head lowered as if to nullify the twenty-five centimeters she has over Suzhen. The lighting is dim, the window darkened, and the air thick with poor ventilation. A bathroom, a bedroom, a corner partitioned off in pretense that the occupant might get the chance to entertain guests or while away their leisure. But Ovuha has kept it all clean, the mattress and sheets straight, the hard floor smooth and unstained.

It takes a whole moment before she spots the bruises.

They are still new, still red, a patch of blunt trauma down the left side of Ovuha’s face. Her lower lip is split. Now that Suzhen knows what to look for, she realizes Ovuha is also moving oddly, as if recovering from being winded. “You’re going to tell me what happened.”

“It is nothing.”

“I decide whether it is something, potentiate.”

Ovuha smooths her hand over the uninjured side of her face, fingers crooked briefly as though twitching to scratch the bruises. “A spouse from the couple next door. I understand his wife has been abusing him. The dysfunction had to go somewhere.”

“And so you let him vent it on you?” Suzhen opens her briefcase, peels open the first-aid kit. She pulls on sanitizing gloves and squeezes out the protean, spreading it on Ovuha’s jawline, up nearly all the way to her temple. It will reduce inflammation, anesthetize, and speed up healing. A panacea for surface wounds. “Take off your shirt. You were punched or kicked in the gut.”

“This must be the most wholesome context for take off your shirt I’ve ever encountered.” Ovuha unzips the shapeless top.

As Suzhen suspected, another bruise, this one purpling. To the flank rather than to the stomach. She accesses the tracker’s diagnostic: no fracture or broken ribs. Ovuha avoided the worst of the damage, either shielding herself well or dodging while making it seem as though the blow solidly connected. “I wasn’t notified that you were in a physical altercation. You didn’t fight back.”

Ovuha lifts her arm, letting Suzhen coat her flank in protean. She winces slightly at the contact of cold paste on skin. “I didn’t. If you are asking whether I could have, yes, I suppose.”

Suzhen sheds her gloves and steps back. True to her professed history, Ovuha has the physique of someone used to hard labor, to the necessities that keep the body from softening. Detainment pared her down to ribcage and jutting pelvic bones, but still she’s in better shape than most. Ovuha could have handled herself, one on one. “A citizen’s guidance would have prevented that from happening at all.” The first sign of violence would have alerted the nearest Interior Defense drone while the guidance warns the aggressor of the consequences. “I’m not saying you should beat a teenage boy within an inch of his life. But you could have alerted me. If not me, someone will come.”

Ovuha leans back on the bed, her smile warped by hardening, translucent protean. “If not you. Whoever comes wouldn’t necessarily distinguish who began the fight. I wish to keep my head down, officer, and be at my best. It’d be naïve of me to expect your colleagues to be as empathic as you.”

“Don’t accuse me of empathy,” Suzhen says flatly. It may be the dimness, the compressed space—the projects have such mean, tight rooms, every floor partitioned into as many units as possible—but she wishes she was back in the corridor. Noise or not, it is a transitional place. The room is a terminus. “The first-aid kit I’ll leave here. Your attacker will be dealt with by his caseworker, but I don’t want to see a repeat. Next time anyone threatens you, you will report it before it gets physical. How are you settling in otherwise?”

“I’ve made a few acquaintances, though most everyone here keeps to themselves.” A pause. “Aren’t you going to ask whether I’ve pawned off the clothes you bought me?”

“They’re yours to do with as you wish. I also think you’re more sensible than that.”

“I worry,” Ovuha murmurs, “that your kindness would be taken advantage of—but that is not my place. Would you like to see the roof? It’s the building’s best feature.”

Which says little, but she is glad for an excuse to get out. Ovuha shrugs on a loose shirt. The elevator is archaic, stale and rusty-smelling, not because there are no funds allocated to upgrade it but because they are on purpose kept this way. To be a citizen is to deserve; to be a probationary resident is to deserve much less. The privileges, the rights, the ability to experience joy without rationing or compromise.

The rooftop is expansive, an open-air garden. Potted flowerbeds white with arachno-floral hybrids that weave fragrant photosynthetic web, waiting to ambush insects. Trellises in spheres and pyramids, some thinly draped in skeleton vines, others smothered in clouds of fire-roses with cinderous petals and thorns like blasted steel. The result is strange and incoherent but, Suzhen realizes, untouched by AI aesthetic. Samsara’s order does not reach here because it is beneath notice.

The corner Ovuha has claimed is secluded behind spotted ferns. A miniature stone garden—truly miniature, the shelf no longer than thirty-five centimeters—where narrow vases hold stunted trees and braided shrubs. Ovuha’s contribution is a titanium cage, tall and polished, its luster as clean as new bone. The bird inside sports plumage in scarab-blue, each feather hammered to razor thinness. Bronze legs, crimson beaks. It bears no resemblance to hawks or falcons, yet it is good craftsmanship, the sort Suzhen might see in an eccentric’s collection. Quaint and expensive. It trills at her, unmusically.

“It’s lovely,” Suzhen offers, wondering what Ovuha did to acquire it.

“One of the families on my floor can’t speak Putonghua very well. I’m tutoring them here and there, not that I’m much of a teacher. They gave me the bird.” Ovuha opens the cage and extends her wrist for the replicant. “They brought it from their home, a station hidden in an asteroid belt. I don’t know what you call it, but they call the place Wyomere. Destroyed long since, caught in crossfire. The family took the bird apart, smuggled the pieces separately so they wouldn’t be confiscated. A leg held by a child, a wing secreted behind clothes, a gyroscope cluster worn around the neck. Can you imagine? The distance people will go just to keep a memento.”

“And they gave it to a near-stranger?”

“A total stranger.” Ovuha lightly strokes the bird’s back. “They felt I wouldn’t be stolen from and wanted me to keep it as long as I live here. Not an impression I ought to make after I let a scrawny teenage boy beat me up. People are strange, don’t you think?”

People are drawn to strength, either because it is a threat or because they see in it the promise of protection. Suzhen imagines Ovuha through the lenses of the bird’s previous owners, this woman who is so new a potentiate and yet self-contained. At ease within her own skin, despite her status, despite being placed in this gray, worn building. The dignity that does not yield. “What do you want out of your life in Anatta?”

Ovuha continues to groom the bird, running an oiled comb through its feathers. “I’m not a person of ambition. I’ll prioritize repaying the generosity that’s been shown me, first.”

“I’m asking what you want. Not what you can do for Anatta.”

“It is your kindness that I meant, not that of the world at large.” Ovuha wipes off excess oil, checks under the coverts. She scrapes off gritty rust and nods to herself, satisfied. “What I want is a life where I make no enemies, where I don’t bend myself toward anyone’s destruction. And if that is not possible, nevertheless I’ll live as though it is. But—” She makes a low chuckle. “You must not take me seriously.”

Statement or request: there is no telling. It is not that Ovuha is unbreakable, rather that she evades so skillfully that the qualities confuse. Seeming is not the same as being, even so, and Suzhen imagines herself on the edge of a cliff. To fall is to admit to Ovuha what she is, that mere decades separate them, probationary resident to Selection Bureau worker. Who were you really, what did you do, did you leave behind family: these things she wants to shout. But under Samsara’s gaze there is no room for an exchange of secrets, least of all the ones her mother took with her to the grave, and which with Suzhen intends to do the same. When she is ashes, if anyone survives her, perhaps it will be safe to tell. “You are full of noble ideals, Ovuha.”

“Not in the least, I just prefer to keep out of trouble. Could I have a surname soon? Having a legal identity without one feels so odd.”

Suzhen pulls up a list before remembering that Ovuha lacks the visual augmentation to see it. She switches on a display, projects it on the ferns. “Here are the available ones, pick what you like best and I’ll have it registered.”

Ovuha studies the names, perhaps counting the syllables and sounding each out in her head, measuring the meaning of each character. After a moment she says, “If it’s not too much trouble, you could choose it for me.”

She has assigned surnames to candidates before, it is not new or even strange, a favor she does for probationary residents whose grasp of Putonghua doesn’t extend to the nuances in a name. But this feels almost too intimate, somehow, too close. No: that’s only imagination, her runaway mind seeking connection and common ground. “Sui,” she says. “How’s that sound? Ovuha Sui.”

“A monarchic name,” Ovuha murmurs. She sweeps into a deep bow, as if she’s been handed a gift, as if this signifies anything more than a caseworker’s routine task. “It is incandescent. Thank you. Let me show you this.”

They walk to the rooftop’s edge, Ovuha’s hand held out, the bird gleaming in the sun. She whispers and flings it outward. With a cry it takes flight, a blazing titanium vector, a flash of bronze talons across the clear, radiant sky. They watch it climb higher and higher until it disappears.

It will come back, Ovuha says. Tame birds are precisely like humans in that way. The pathological sense of home, the inability to let go.

Within a day, Ovuha’s bruises have faded to faint smears. Suzhen covers them up with a thin layer of tinted emollients, adds pigment to Ovuha’s hairline and under her cheekbones so that the gauntness seems intentional and sophisticated, rather than a byproduct of privation. Mauve lips, ombré-black in the center. To the steel-gray angular clothes, Suzhen adds a scarf Taheen gave her that she felt too refined to wear herself. The fabric is slick and opalescent, the texture like faceted fur as though it was shorn alive from a jewel animal. Ovuha wears it noose-tight: on her it sits just right. She turns slowly, studying her reflection. “I look expensive.”

“That’s the idea.”

Away from the Jasmine and what it signifies, Ovuha is a chameleon. She wears the fine clothes, the haute-couture scarf, without doubt or effort. She belongs. In the train, among the crowd, down the thoroughfares and across the corkscrew bridges. The only tell is that Ovuha does not react to guidepost hubs at points of gravitational shift on the bridges; she wrong-foots, often, and laughs as she finds herself falling upward.

At the Selection Bureau, Ovuha is escorted into her preliminary session. Suzhen takes to a balcony, lighting one cigarette, snuffing it out, lighting another one. She tries to refrain from turning on the interview feed—she is entitled to—and after a third aborted cigarette, she gives up resisting. The channel comes on. Ovuha is seated alone in a room, surrounded by starless dark, some void far from the lights of Anatta’s satellites and helix-gates. The blackness covers nearly everything, swallowing up floor and ceiling and furniture, as if Ovuha is sitting on empty air. A voice as neutral as a guidance’s speaks. “What is the imperative that informs every human choice?”

“Conflict,” Ovuha says to the dark, “the basal urge. To fight or to take flight: that is the binary which preoccupies the human intellect. No veneer of civilization may tame it, no eons of refinement may clean the dreams of blood, this hunger to see the inside of another person’s guts.”

“What is Samsara?”

“Limitless and true. The splendor that permeates. The custodian unmarred by desire or impulse.”

Suzhen bites down on the dead cigarette. It tastes charred, papery. Her guidance notifies her of her heightened pulse and blood pressure. When it was her turn the room was merely sterile, done in the muted half-colors of grief and ennui. She was in that borderland between childhood and adulthood; her mother was dying, and in bureaucratic terms that meant it was time for her to test for citizenship of her own. Suzhen acquitted herself as best she could, by then used to reciting the right responses, the correct amount of conviction. Her gorge rises. She bends over the balcony, gripping the railing, and dry-heaves. In the void-shrouded room the interview goes on, and now comes the crucial response.

“Samsara is the anatomy of forgetting,” Ovuha says. “Under its guidance we cast out the knowledge of main force and our animal instincts, our taste for devastation, our need to salt the ground and glass the earth. Samsara is the bulwark between us and the extinction we would bring upon ourselves. Beyond its gaze, entropy awaits. Outside its bounds, there lies only ruin.”

All that eloquence, and perhaps—What I want is a life where I make no enemies—Ovuha even believes in it, the ideal refugee who seeks safety as well as ideological compatibility. How absurd. Suzhen wipes her mouth and composes herself. By the time Ovuha emerges, she is halfway through another cigarette, not aborted this time.

Ovuha looks wan from the exit decontamination, her system freshly cleansed of the trance drugs, her pupils dilated. She blinks blearily at the light. “How did I do? I don’t remember much of what I said.”

No question as to whether Suzhen observed, merely an assumed default. “You were entirely articulate.”

“What a thing to say,” Ovuha murmurs.

That a refugee can be eloquent, articulate, precise with words in Putonghua. “That’s not what I meant.”

“No. That is true. My apologies—I’m being unfair.”

“The world is unfair,” Suzhen says, and she could finish the thought—that the world has been unfair to Ovuha specifically, as it is unfair to those descended from exiles who forsook Samsara—but she refrains. Too mollifying, too apologetic, when she does not owe Ovuha that. “Do you feel up to job interviews or shall we call it a day? I’ve already registered your certifications. You’re technically equivalent to a citizen who’s received ten years of basic education.” An underestimate, but there is an upper limit for how far a candidate can be certified. Nothing tertiary, even when Ovuha’s skills are well beyond that.

“It’s remarkable that the possibility of me getting work is legal.” The potentiate loosens her scarf and reties it into a complicated, rosette knot. “Truly Anatta’s magnanimity is boundless. I’m up to it. I don’t wish to be difficult.”

“I should tell you that if your neighbors—or that family you’re giving language lessons to—offer you help finding work, it’s best to turn them down politely. Even if they insist it’s better money than anything you can officially get.” A market for refugee flesh; there is always one, always thriving.

“No one’s offered, but I will keep that in mind.”

Their first stop is at an ornithology lab, where bird cultivars are made to order. They wait in the showroom where sample birds sing in faultless harmony, preening, their plumage in every shade. There are openings for janitorial and menial work—the facility’s run by someone who prefers human hands over drones—and at first Ovuha is received warmly enough, despite her status. The interviewer sours at one point and Suzhen, again monitoring at a distance, thinks she knows why. Ovuha’s fineness, the absence of abjection. It is not that Ovuha is impolite, rather the opposite, but the interviewer expected a charity case, an object on which pity can be visited upon. Yet Ovuha resists both being an object and being pitiable. She should have left her potentiate in terrible clothes, Suzhen thinks, grimed and bare of cosmetics.

Next they visit a teahouse. Kitchen work, away from the view of diners. Here it goes even more poorly, the interviewer asking outright what Ovuha is doing here. “I’m in need of work,” Ovuha says mildly; it earns her a request to leave.

Ovuha looks over her shoulder as they exit. “Perhaps I should’ve shown up in rags.”

“It’s only been two places.” Suzhen consults her list and requests navigation from her guidance. “Be patient.”

The third and fourth don’t proceed much better. A citizen is evaluated and given a choice of assignments: none of this reliance on human caprices, the surface compassion that can turn into petty cruelty at the flip of a coin. Making the process the same for potentiates would have been far more efficient, more humane. Suzhen once asked her mother why. Mother folded her hands. Samsara is intimately familiar with human nature. When life is otherwise perfectly manicured, precisely arranged by machine, you lose your agency. But if you cannot control your fate, still you can seek to control another’s. In this way you may retain an illusion of power, of being master of your own life, and so continue to be complacent. And contented subjects are easy to govern.

What would happen, Suzhen wonders, when there are no more warlords and no more war-torn seekers of asylum; when the colonies have been disbanded or annexed under Samsara rule, humanity set on the path to paradise. All then would be citizens, all would be—in name—equal.

Before she sees Ovuha off, she says, “We’ll get you employed before the month is out. No matter how tempting, don’t take on work that sounds too good to be true.”

“Such as being research subjects?”

“Someone did offer to help you then.”

Ovuha half-chuckles. “I’m not a child, officer. When one’s skills are not suitable, and few options are open, what remains but to sell the flesh? Organs, pharmaceutical and cybernetic testing, other things. It is not that any of them is lesser work. They fulfill a need. But I do have particular ideas on the autonomy of my body, even if I can’t afford to. You needn’t fear.”

The things one can afford and the things one can’t. When she is home, Suzhen double-checks the altar to her mother, to make sure the offerings she left have not faded into motes of dust.

Chapter Four

Being in a theater reminds Suzhen that she has not been in one for a long time or consumed any entertainment that requires in-person presence. It is small, exclusive, the kind of establishment that invites people like Taheen rather than people who work in bureaucracies. Taheen has come with her but has lingered at the reception and so Suzhen sits, alone, among the empty boxes that revolve slowly above the stage. Her friend encouraged her to mingle, but theirs is not company she enjoys. Even if Suzhen had tested into such fields, she doubts she’d belong with career artists, who universally have a particular temperament. The easy assumption that what they do matter the most: more significant, more brimful of meaning than clerical or administrative or menial work. The subsuming of identity and personality into passion.

Taheen arrives in their shared loge, wreathed in a cloud of cocktails and perfume. “I finally figured out how this new painter got a spot at Kufreabasi’s gallery. Apparently zie slept with Kufreabasi while they were at this artists’ retreat. So tawdry.”

Suzhen has no idea who the painter or Kufreabasi is, or why Taheen should take an interest, given that they don’t paint and neither person could possibly be competition. “You slept with plenty of people.”

“Well sure, everyone does that, but you’re supposed to be subtler about it when you’re starting out. Besides, zie is an obvious sycophant and zir work’s far too pandering. Painting about being a painter, art about being an artist, that sort of thing. I can’t bear the type. Here, I got you a glass.”

She takes the drink—more tea and fruit than alcohol, the way she likes it—and watches the light around them dim, the other boxes fill. “You still haven’t told me what the play is about.” She could have looked it up, but that would have made Taheen sulk, and in any case she prefers to hear it from them.

“Political allegory. No plot—literally, not just me being catty.” Taheen empties their glass in a single gulp. “We aren’t here for the quality of the script, you understand, just for the quality of acting. Vipada’s the lead.”

The auditorium deepens from white to the turquoise of sunlit sea, gold-green. Stimulated water laps and pushes against the glass of their loge. For a time—two solid minutes—nothing else happens save this gentle rocking motion and a few piano notes, muted and distant. The loges tilt backward, directing the audience’s gazes to the ceiling.

From overhead a body is falling, facedown, limbs spread. The descent is slow, resisted by the currents and the white funeral shawl that it wears. A woman with immense dark eyes, hair behind her like a comet, her expression glazed with the blankness of the dreaming or the dead. The ambience darkens, shedding the gold of daylight. “I am dead,” a voice says, “and I’m not awake.”

A second voice: “Perhaps you have never been.”

The body—the woman—stirs, shaking her head, righting herself in the water. She touches the shroud she wears, the soft material, and in distaste tears it off. Underneath she is not bare but armored, torso clad in red steel, limbs sheathed in shadow iron. “I am the Wayupuk, bird of war. Even in death I know no defeat.” Freed of the shroud, she sinks faster, feet first. She reaches into the deepening currents and draws from them a gun, the weapon phenomenally made, the black-pearl luster evident even in the dim.

Suzhen suspects she knows where this is going. But Vipada plays the part with sharp conviction, the warlord in the afterlife passing through her spiritual judges and inquisitors, remorseless even as she is pulled down to the ocean floor. “It is the human condition to be culpable in evil,” she says as the dark swallows her. “Great or small, the sole difference is the extent. Life is a slaughterhouse. You take charge of it or you’re swept away by it; you are the butcher or you are the meat.”

The irredeemable monster, admitting no regrets and making no apologies. Yet proud to the end. Perhaps intentional, perhaps not, though Suzhen expects it would have been more politic to portray the analogue for the Warlord of the Thorn with a less comely face, a more pathetic mien.

At the afterparty Taheen introduces her to Vipada, who alone of the cast has already shed cosmetics and costume, fresh-faced and incongruously mortal amidst a crowd of ghostly magistrates and afterlife demons. When she hears what Suzhen does for a living, she breaks into applause. “Thank goodness. I was going to throw up if I had to meet one more critic or really anyone who breathes the arts. The arts, even that sounds so nauseating, don’t you think? What a relief to see a person who lives in the real world.”

“Vipada is an artist who can’t stand other artists.” Taheen leans toward Suzhen, faux-conspiratorial. “Especially other actors.”

“Oh, Taheen, you can’t stand us either. Creatives excel at one thing and that’s being insufferable—if I have to hear one more writer claim they spin lies for a living! They think it’s such a charming joke instead of absolutely trite. If only my final evaluation had given me a choice of profession in accountancy or biochemistry…” Out of character Vipada is animated, expression mobile, hands moving fluidly as she talks. None of the cold solemnity of the dead general, the sheer heft of presence. “Tell me about your work, please, Suzhen. Everyone in here wants to talk nothing else but the play.”

She’s caught off-guard; there is no script for being asked about her work as though someone is taking a genuine interest. “It’s fairly mundane.” The rapid desensitization to suffering, the numbing of procedure. “Most people would agree the things you do here are far more interesting. Ideas are potent. Carrying out regulations isn’t.”

“No, no. That’s the self-serving loftiness artists want to sell you. Ideas are fine. Ideas can affect. But doing is important—more important than thinking about it. Experience is what makes a person interesting, not ideas, and you must’ve accrued a stunning wealth.”

It is easy to be flattered, charmed. But as Suzhen speaks of Bureau work and attempts to make it sound exciting, she realizes that the actor wants to be thrilled. Vipada expects Suzhen to share the tragedies of those who enter and exit her office, their hard-won triumphs, their humility and simplicity. The lives of those born in a dominion of ruin. It is a safe thrill, a reminder that on Anatta deprivation is a remote concept, improbable and impermissible—as long as one is a citizen. Vipada may claim her heart bleeds for those in need but nevertheless she belongs to the norm, the default, and how much better it is to be so; how wondrous it is to haverather than to lack.

Suzhen finds herself almost speaking of Ovuha, that finely made, immensely educated potentiate. The one who would not have required entry to Anatta if her home had not been destroyed by the Peace Guard. The one who could be in this room and join the conversation as gracefully as any, whose bearing is as sophisticated as Vipada’s. She refrains. Ovuha is not a story or a character; she doesn’t exist as a vehicle through which Suzhen can deliver an argument. In the end, to shift the subject, she says, “You were very believable. The Wayupuk, bird of war.”

Vipada laughs. “Not my usual thing, but I try not to get typecast. Taheen—” She points; they have wandered off to hold court among a group of playwrights. “Taheen would tell you I tend to play flighty gods or devious ingénues—vixens, you know—and they aren’t wrong. So I was going to challenge myself. Getting into character for this one took incredible research. I watched interviews with refugees, read their biographies. For their perspective of the warlords, you understand.”

The perspective of being at gunpoint, tearing up images of revered symbols. The perspective of being made to fabricate miseries and terror under a warlord’s iron heel. And Suzhen would be the first to admit that not all warlords are benevolent with their own people, but—she tamps that down. Even indulging that line of thought will make it express on her face, like pustules. There’s so much she must keep to herself. “Was the character meant to be any particular figure or just an amalgam?”

“Ah, I’m not the author, but I expect the script’s meant to be… topical. There were some last-minute changes to my character—” Vipada flutters her fingers. “But that’s all backstage and the changes improved the play, if I may say so myself. They’re such mysterious creatures, the warlords, I’ve always wondered how they can keep their faces and identities such perfect secrets. Maybe in a few years we’ll uncover it all. True, they’re monsters, but there’s anthropological value to the culture, isn’t there? The history, the mystique. It’s surely worth studying once they’re no longer a threat.”

“It must be fascinating,” Suzhen agrees, wondering whether Taheen has been exposed to this particular side of Vipada. Probably they have, and they would say Suzhen takes the actor’s fetishism too seriously, that it doesn’t matter. What matters is to seize the life she has, to thrive.

They continue to talk, and Anthropological value, isn’t there? or not, Vipada is an easy conversationalist; the actor waves away her admirers, the few critics who’ve been allowed into the afterparty, and plies Suzhen with more tisane cocktails. “Let’s meet again,” she says before she departs to mingle.

On her part, Suzhen cannot imagine what Vipada could find of interest in her. But the actor is not unpleasant and Suzhen tells herself this is progress, this is a step out of her shell. She doesn’t have to commit to anything. Taheen sees her off—she wants to tell them she’d rather have spent time with them but keeps that to herself. No point being their burden, latching onto them like a barnacle; she has been that long enough.

Compulsively she checks on Ovuha. The tracker points to a park several blocks from Gweilan Station. There are restrictions on how far Ovuha can travel, how long she can spend away from her housing or work, and so far Ovuha has complied without fail. A model candidate. Her supervisor Nattharat congratulated Suzhen on her first sponsorship going so well, but not before offering unsolicited advice. Early days yet, my dear. Plenty of them behave for six months and the minute they’re out of sight, they turn to drugs and petty theft. They sell their children. You can’t trust them, honestly probation should go on for a year minimum. Six months don’t tell you a thing.

What are you here for, Suzhen wanted to ask, why are you in this line of work when you loathe them so desperately, when you think of them as less than animals. The Selection Bureau doesn’t screen for empathy in its personnel: if it did, there would be maybe a dozen agents assigned per city, twenty at most. She turns back to Ovuha’s vital signs—all fine—and double-checks the alerts she’s set in place. More than anything she’s wanted to stay hands-off, granting Ovuha total privacy, but after the beating she’s started to monitor risk indicators. Her potentiate will survive and gain citizenship, come hell or high water, Suzhen is determined in that much.

Against her better judgment—and against years of habit otherwise—she wends her way toward the section of Gweilan where new citizens live, not around the projects but the residential blocks for those who have achieved class theta. Achieved, she catches herself thinking that word, as though this is a status earned by merit and earnest labor. Not by precarious luck and a caseworker’s caprices. Officially there is no demarcation between theta and prime, one can live wherever one wishes provided one meets the criteria: income, evaluation scores, criminal record. But those newly out of probationary residency have less of the first and the second, nearly always a blemish on the third. The potentiate’s stipend is so vanishingly little and when one has nothing, something is worth any cost—even if it incurs a criminal record. The petty thefts Nattharat is so worried about, the ones that mean a difference between a good meal and pap.

She enters the kind of shop that she used to know well, where a little of everything may be found, cheaper than elsewhere. Dried foods heavy on starch, packets of synthetic flavoring, raw ingredients for communal meal fabricators. It is closer to rations on starved territories—the ones unclaimed by warlords and therefore fair game for all—than it is to food, but it stretches further than real meat. Diluted protean, thinned liquor, mass-produced academic uniforms that don’t quite fit and would have to be altered at home. Hairpins, combs, soap that will clean well enough but smell of wax. Cheap animated one-use cosmetics, bits and bobs for repairing household appliances. A miscellany for those who lack, who can’t afford any better, and who want to acquire what they can afford in one place because it is convenient and most days they don’t have the energy to trawl a hundred boutiques. Suzhen browses the shelf of software modules: bootleg navigation and assistive algorithms, month-to-month access to entertainment. These niceties, excluded from a theta-class citizen’s guidance, are manufactured scarcity even more so than the food.

The other shoppers give her wide berth, a reminder that she should’ve gone home to change before setting foot here. The clothes Taheen made her wear—their design, an affair of periwinkle-gray shards and ember fragments—give her away at a glance. A slumming voyeur, smelling of expensive theaters and debonair actors and absurd cocktails. She used to hate those misery tourists, the sight and scent of them filling her with rage; even young it was fully-formed rage and she imagined their flesh bursting like ripe papaya, citizenship spilling out of them like rotten seeds.

She rubs her hands together, fingers tingling with nervous energy, with remembered anger. She meets no one’s gaze as she exits, knowing she won’t remember their faces; that like the Bureau has trained her to, she will abstract them to category tags and then forget about them entirely. Citizen class theta, citizen class theta, citizen class theta. She will not wish to recall them.

“You should not enter this area again, citizen,” her guidance murmurs. “It causes you undue distress.”

That one thing she misses from her time as probationary resident. The blessed, total silence. The freedom from this vapid nagging voice, this panoptic chaperoning presence.

Sunset strikes the roof. The arachno-floral hybrids are in a frenzy, their web thick and shivering. Nocturnal insects have emerged, moths and mosquitoes and fireflies. They swarm the flowerbed, a feast that serves itself, drawn by scent and sweetness and color. Ovuha watches and compares real insects to replicant ones, the actual to the artificial—she has always found real insects difficult to tolerate, faintly repulsive. The lymphatic fluids they hide, purulent despite the sleekness of carapace, of wings. She watches them fall into the web and sink, thrashing, trapped. There is a metaphor. She refrains from thinking on it; too obvious, too elementary, and she would be the bugs rather than the web.

She goes to the replicant cardinal, tending to it as she ever does. As yet, it hasn’t yielded its secrets. She touches its flanks, looking for a feather that doesn’t seat quite right, an activation mechanism. None has evinced so far, and knowing her predecessor—the one who set all this into motion—it would fall upon her to find the right phrase, the right code. Only she does not have the luxury to stand there and whisper scraps of poetry one after another until the correct one occurs, this chasing of a riddle whose shape she does not even recognize. And, always, she is watched.

Ovuha returns the replicant to its cage. Unnecessary, when all’s said and done; it is not equipped with free will, an instinct for the skies, and will stay where it is put. The cage is salve to human insecurity. Birds belong in cages, that is the assumed default. A city crow flits by, basalt against the deepening blue, against the limned clouds. Perhaps it sees her, perhaps not. There is no telling which animal is true and which a replicant slaved to Samsara’s awareness, eyes and ears for the vast intelligence. Even the ground on which she stands may collaborate. By all accounts, the AI controls every square centimeter of every city.

But even that is not impenetrable or infallible, and there are parts of Anatta sealed to Samsara’s sight. This she knows for a fact.

The Luo children are emerging onto the rooftop. She counts two. The other two are absent today, the ones least interested in getting along with her, whatever their parents’ instructions. Their parents, who were most likely paid and given passage in exchange for carrying out a small, specific task. Bringing this bird all the way and handing it to the person who offers to give their children language lessons. Ovuha was surprised they held up their end at all, but perhaps her presence—that she proved to be real—brings with it an implicit threat. A debt must be repaid, or else.

She asks them, in slow careful Putonghua, how they are coming along with their conversational language. “The important thing,” she tells them, “is to pick up vocabulary through context clues. You don’t need to understand the whole sentence, just three words—or even two—out of five.”

“Good day, uncle,” the youngest says. They’re seven or ten, she judges, inexact; she is not good at children’s ages, is far more accustomed to ones who are well-fed and well-provided for. Malnourishment makes them look younger than they are.

“Auntie,” she corrects. It does not always matter, but to an Anatta native any linguistic error from a potentiate’s child is cause enough to be petty, and maliciously so.

“Younger-sibling Natelia didn’t come today.” The child, whose name she never quite remembers, looks up at her with large eyes the color of faded radium. “Couldn’t come. He was brought away yesterday.”

This surprises Ovuha. Even the Bureau is usually not so remorseless as to separate a child from their family, as far as she’s aware. Perhaps she is not aware enough, having not had to concern herself with such ancillary attachments. “To where?”

“To a new Papa and Mama.” The child does not sound as though they entirely comprehend the concept. “They said we can visit and Natelia will have lots of sugar to eat.”

Sweets, she presumes that means, a malapropism. “He was adopted out?” Some citizens are denied a parental license—Ovuha suspects the reason is psychological incompatibility, an aspect of character or personality that makes them unfit for child-rearing. But if they want to adopt a potentiate’s offspring, the barrier might be lower, if at all extant. She tries to remember. Natelia is probably five, young enough for the new parents to see as malleable. One less mouth to feed for the Luo spouses.

“We can visit,” the child insists.

Ovuha does not dispute—there is no point—and simply moves on to a vocabulary quiz. By her judgment most of the children are as well-equipped as they can be, they will pick up Putonghua in time, they’re young enough and their language centers still plastic. None of them received in utero cognitive stacks, cerebral links that would teach them language in the womb and enhance memory: Wyomere is not that kind of place. All things there are unregulated and the Luos were able to have as many offspring as they wanted. To poor results, she would judge, but such is not her business. Wyomere was a wild territory, outside the control of any warlord not because it was good at defending itself, but because it had nothing to offer. Sawdust and cinders.

The children, as one, pause in their reciting of a Putonghua rhyme. Around them, the Jasmine’s other residents drop what they are doing, whether that is watering plants or handling laundry. Almost apologetically her students put their heads down before darting out of sight, down the staircase, evacuating the rooftop with the rest.

Very quickly she is alone, save for a deeply tattooed person advancing upon her.

They are openly armed, a coppery gun strapped to their hip, theatrically long in the barrel. The kind of firearm one uses on an armored vehicle or a large animal—Ovuha suspects its owner has given it a name. She can almost hear the tug and push of a passing crow’s ciliary wires, or the whirr-click within the minuscule, sizzling brain of a moth trapped in the spider-flower web. Apparatuses through which Samsara may survey its domain, reading sight and sound, emissions and heat. In theory that means everyone is protected at all times, even non-citizens. In practice, she knows no Interior Defense will be dispatched, for the same reason that camp wardens are free to exercise petty tyranny on the bodies of their charges. Bodies without personhood are no more remarkable, and no more deserving of mercy, than a cut of chicken or a handful of offal.

Even so this thug, or whoever their master is, makes her curious: they are not Bureau or Interior Defense. Institutional cruelty is one thing. Privatized is quite another.

“You’re new here,” they say.

“I’m afraid so.” She doesn’t assay witticisms, something clever. Instead she looks them over, evaluating as they draw near and then stop a few paces from her. A threat on account of the gun, but also because they’re wiry and move like someone who understands impact, understands the workings of human muscles and alimentary channels. Where to hurt to disable, where to inflict permanent damage.

The thug lights a cigar. The reek of it overwhelms the air. “It is dangerous to be without friends, Ovuha Sui. You may find yourself in want of things, in need even, of ways in or ways out. People need people. United we stand…”

Ovuha is almost moved to smile at this cliché, at how meaningless it is, at the way it is uttered as a taunt. At the theatrics of this person’s tattoos, their elongated firearm. Every aspect is rote. “I would not mind friends. What do I have to do for friendship, stranger?”

“With information, stranger, or a fraction of your potentiate’s stipend.”

“I haven’t any information to offer, and a fraction of almost nothing is a small fraction indeed.” She spreads her hands. “At the present I don’t find myself pressed with any need, and so I’ll have to ask you to come some other time with this offer of friendship.”

The thug rushes her. She could foil the charge, it is easy enough: as they accelerate she can kick their knee, or she can grab an elbow, potentially break it. This is a combatant, but not one of any particular ability. But she has learned to take blows since she came to Anatta, has learned to accept and tolerate pain within reasonable bounds. She permits it to happen. They slam her into the wall—potted bonzais shudder; by luck the vases do not teeter and topple.

There is no blow forthcoming. Instead they’ve slapped something into her inner elbow, a jab of heat. The thug backs away, has—despite the routine—not even drawn their gun. “Don’t bother calling Interior Defense. This is a warning,” they say and turn on their heels, their business done. A gangly silhouette stalking off.

She stares after them, then at the dermal patch on her skin. Mottled gray, adhesive: it has drawn blood, has punctured with tiny needles, nearly painless. It does nothing at all, she feels only the faintest sting, less than the bite of an ant. In a few seconds heat overtakes her, total, and warps her entire limbic response. She staggers backward and a pot does fall this time, spilling twisted shrub and crystallized fertilizer and gray soil. Her back cracks against something hard. Her vision turns liquid, as though she’s viewing the world from deep undersea.

One of her implants quickens.

A contact toxin, but one that is also a puzzle for her—and only her—to solve. Strands of ancient math unfurl before her, roiling unkempt equations. Beneath them, a part of code. It is a game of memory more than anything, except the last time she saw the set was five years ago, maybe eight, and she lacks the array of mnemonics or recording that she once had. Her naked brain, for the most part, is the only aid and tool left to her. Any other she cannot yet make use.

She has fifteen seconds.

Flip the strands. Reverse the order of code. Match them to what she remembers. There is no confirmation whether she has done them half correct or a quarter or none at all until the heat relents and the poison subsides. The reward is her continued breathing when otherwise she would have gone into anaphylaxis.

Ovuha draws herself up, peeling off the dermal patch. It has been spent, but she’ll find a way to dispose of it later so that no trace will be left. Had she died here, all the rest would have died with her, unless her replacement has been trained in secret—secret even from her, a contingency for a contingency. That is possible, knowing her predecessor, a woman who liked schemes within schemes. Who liked to be absolutely, utterly sure, a habit Ovuha has inherited herself.

Best to act as though she is the last, all the same. No slack. No mistake.

She inhales the air, which still carries the stench of cigar, and in her head a map expands and pours. Information like a virus, which she will need time to detangle and absorb, make a part of herself. But from the shape of it, she is sure that what needs preparing has been prepared; the seeds have been planted, and now she must reap the harvest.

On her knees, she gathers up fragments of pottery and rubs the dry soil between her fingertips until it is fine powder. She glances at the sky. It is empty and growing dark. In her imagination, it is incandescent and subjugated, blotted out by golden ships.

Chapter Five

The dead of night, blackly quiet. Suzhen jerks awake from a dream of silence tolling like bells, a dream of her birthplace. It has not made an appearance in a long time. The halls that stretched on without end, the faceted roofs and nested windows that looked out to red, naked earth.

She reads the alert and swears through her teeth. As quickly as she can she puts on her clothes, sending out a call as she does. She’s notified that first response has already been dispatched, and the nearest Interior Defense patrol will soon be about. Soon being subjective, from within the minute to within the hour. Anywhere else and they would have been onsite immediately, but the projects are disposable, the people in them even more so.

The Jasmine is in smoke when she arrives, plumes and strands of it spiraling through windows. First-response drones are extinguishing the fire, whirring through the building in sleek, silver schools. From the look of it, the combustion must have spread over an entire floor, the insulation barriers too ancient to keep it in check. Two floors, Suzhen corrects herself as her taxi lands. The roof is alight with emergency signals, marking the area off-limit to aerial traffic.

She finds Ovuha in the courtyard with the other residents. Most cluster together for comfort or shared resignation, standing guard over their belongings. Clothes, hard currency, first-aid kits. Jewelry and data cubes in clutched hands, the few pieces that have survived camp confiscation. Ovuha alone is without possessions, other than the portable strapped to her wrist.

“The fire started in my room,” Ovuha says calmly. “I must apologize—I wasn’t able to save the clothes you bought for me.”

“In your room.” The dying flames and emergency lights carve up Ovuha’s face, giving it the look of cracked sculpture. Suzhen calls up diagnostics. First-degree burns along one arm. “How did it happen?” Her first thought veers inevitably to self-harm. The sudden guttering of will that can happen to anyone, any time, striking hard and fast as fire on human dermis. A cigarette burn here, a heated razor there. But the diagnostics reports that the injuries are fresh and the intensity of combustion too great, explosive.

“Someone broke into my room while I was out and took the first-aid kit, among others, anything valuable I’d guess. When I came back, the detonation went off. Timed or motion-triggered, hard to tell.” Ovuha has dressed her arm in layers of gauze and she holds it away from her body. Her gaze is still on what remains of her room: the window is shattered. “According to my neighbors there was a power outage just before; whoever did this made sure the surveillance would be off. The apartment’s security is none too robust against tampering.”

Said as though Ovuha has tried tampering with it herself, but Suzhen lets it lie. “Was it the boy who beat you up?”

“I doubt it. He and his wife lived too close, the explosion or the fire could have reached them. Someone might have believed I hoarded untold wealth in my room. Why the rest of it, I can’t imagine. Perhaps I looked at someone wrong.” But a flicker of expression tells Suzhen that Ovuha has a good idea who the perpetrator is or at least why they blew up her room. “Speaking of which, officer, do you notice you’re the only caseworker here?”

It is not as if Suzhen could have failed to notice. Interior Defense still has not arrived, save for their drones. There are no human personnel on the ground other than herself and she’s a civil servant, not a medic or Interior Defense. Her colleagues—some of whom must have the Jasmine’s residents under their purview—are absent entirely. “They’ll be here momentarily. I was likely the closest.” She rubs at her eyes, exhaustion catching up. Two hours of sleep and she doubts she’s getting any more tonight. Her temples ache. Her eyes hurt and her nose stings with grit and smoke. “You’ll give your statement and then you’re coming with me. I’ve put in a housing request, but the transfer won’t happen until morning, if that.”

“You’re giving me a great deal of time and energy. I’m not sure what to say or do about that.”

She doesn’t answer and waits as Ovuha gives her statement to an Interior Defense drone, murmuring to its flat, featureless mask and staring into its gelatinous eyes. Public-facing drones could have been made in more humanoid image, but the only intelligence permitted anthropomorphic bodies is Samsara itself. The rest inhabit mannequin shells, boxy facades and porcelain carapaces, often insectoid and alien.

Once all residents have been rounded up for questioning—none missing, though a few are injured—and their statements recorded, Suzhen authenticates for custody rights to Ovuha, the way one might for an orphaned child or a pet, though Anatta treats both of those more kindly than it treats potentiates. Fortunately Ovuha is not detained as a suspect; the detonation timestamps itself and lines up with her statement, and though there’s no footage of the saboteur there is footage of her leaving and returning to the complex. There is no record of her acquiring flammable material. From Interior Defense’s perspective, there is still a possibility she set it all up herself, timing her absence, the power outage, and the explosion precisely. But for now, she’s allowed to go.

Ovuha is quiet on the train ride. Under better lighting her burned arm is more obviously raw, swelling up translucent and yellow. Second-degree then.

Suzhen hasn’t brought painkillers or much of anything else. She settles on distraction. “What’s Gurudah like?”

The look Ovuha gives her is edgy, startled. “There is not much to say.” Her voice is slightly strained, her gaze glassy with pain.

“A tidally locked planet. That must be different.”

“The day half too hot, the night half too cold. Neither fit for habitation. We had some agriculture down there, small patches; most of the time we lived in orbit. Gurudah has an atmosphere, though much shredded. There were seas. Superb to look at from afar, if devoid of life. We call the planet that, but the real Gurudah was the orbital; that was where people sank their roots, raised their families.”

She lets Ovuha ramble on about hydroponics and the merit of gourds over root vegetables. From her telling Gurudah sounds sufficient, even comfortable. If she suffered hardship or deprivation in her former life Ovuha glosses over it, for much the same reason Suzhen would have. Making oneself an object of tragedy and pity is easy. Retaining dignity while doing so is not.

Outside Suzhen’s apartment, Ovuha hesitates. “I must be the least hygienic thing to have ever entered your home.”

“I’ve had drunk friends come in and throw up on my sofa. So no. Do you need to be shown how the shower works?”

Ovuha tentatively presses the gauze against her arm, but most of it is sliding off, drenched in lymph. “I shouldn’t think so.”

She makes chilled coffee as she waits. It’s tempting to break out something alcoholic or light a cigarette, but she refrains. Why am I doing this. But she already knows the answer. More than being about Ovuha it is a proof of herself—that she can help even one candidate, lift them out of the muck of mandated misery. On the scale of Anatta at large, it doesn’t mean anything, a single life, a single person. Nevertheless. And of course she chose a candidate with phenomenal odds, she wouldn’t have sponsored the man who broke down in her office, the parents who came here with three children in tow, the starved teenager who could barely speak Putonghua. She selects and she discards; she is culpable. The human condition, like Vipada’s character said.

Ovuha comes out in the robe Suzhen loaned her, another article of Taheen’s largesse. Wasp taffeta, green-black, and a sash made of ceramic satin. On the potentiate it looks good, as good as it might look on a mannequin. The hem comes up slightly short, midway down Ovuha’s long, muscled calves.

“It’s a relief,” Ovuha says as she joins Suzhen at the table. A school of particulate betta glides past her; a handful stay to swim circles, orbiting her. “Just to be genuinely clean again. One never contemplates how hygiene connects to feeling like a person.” She has already administered disinfectant and protean to her arm; the latter is hardening on the burned skin, milky like frosted glass.

Suzhen slides over a glass and pours coffee. “I’ve got painkillers.” Protean numbs the area topically, but not for long.

“No. I’m fine. It’s not that I like pain, but I prefer to keep a lucid head.”

“Stoically bearing agony isn’t necessarily a virtue. Medical care does exist for a reason.” She has her guidance show her an inventory of her pantry. “Something to eat?”

“My thanks. But not at the moment.”

They sit in quiet, sipping from their glasses. Suzhen watches Ovuha take in her apartment, gaze going from the ocean-lamps to the betta, to the neat, clean furniture, the tidy shelves and paneled doors. The width of the rooms, the structured comforts of a class-prime.

Ovuha’s eyes linger, brief but noticeable, on the altar, on the image of Suzhen’s mother. She does not ask or comment. Instead: “You must be absolutely exhausted. Don’t let me keep you up, officer.”

“You can have the sofa.”

“I could as easily take the floor. It’s terribly soft.” Ovuha’s mouth twists. “I’ll try to take up as little space as possible. May I make you breakfast in the morning, or lunch if that’s when you get up?”

Suzhen’s first impulse is to say no. Having a stranger in her home is bad enough, an invasive presence; having one root through her spices and condiments is worse. “I wouldn’t mind.” She remembers having nothing. How every kindness felt like a burden of debt she must repay with haste, rare and few as it was. Doubly so because it was rare.

Coffee never does much to her and she falls asleep smoothly, nearly without transition between conscious and not. The dream continues where she left off, the palace with its beehive chambers, and her a child again. She is always a child in these memories, true to life, small and shod in bright, soft sandals. Beads around her neck, beads on her skirt, clattering with her movement. She loved to run, loved to explore the hall that was also her world. What felt like innumerable corridors, forking off into a hundred paths and a thousand doors, endless and full of possibility. She did not have much in the way of playmates; under the Mirror dominion childbirths were closely regulated. To be born was itself a privilege.

Suzhen was too young to understand that yet, too young to understand even that it was unusual for anyone to see the warlord unmasked, unarmored. A tall figure silhouetted by sun and dust, standing by a window, bending to her and chuckling at something she said.

In the dream, as in memory, the warlord asks her a question. Do you want to see a jewel of a world? It is called Mahakala; even this name is a secret. That is what the Thorn governs, the seat of their power, a treasure Samsara itself would envy. A planet even more superb than ours, a planet of sapphire canopies and eternal dancers. The oceans, child. We’ll taste its spray upon our skin, breathe in the brine and the salt, and make the depths yield their pearls.

She wakes up to the taste of smoke in her nostrils, lingering at the back of her mouth, an admonishment that she never cleaned up before slipping into bed. Her guidance gives her an updated inventory of her pantry: what ingredients have been used and how much, down to the milligram. A risible thing to monitor; she dismisses it.

Dawn has molted away and the bettas have faded, replaced by their daytime counterpart, red butterflies that flit through the bugleweeds and begonias that now carpet the floor. Jasmine-rice steam overtakes the air. She follows its trail to the kitchen where Ovuha is dicing garlic by hand. “Good morning, officer. Is there any tableware I shouldn’t touch?”

“I’m not particular, use anything you feel like. The fancy ones were all gifts.” Taheen’s again, occasionally coworkers’ in the mix. Presents in the forms of cutlery and ceramics is an Anatta custom she’s never understood, despite the decades. How a meal is eaten, how the food is presented, strikes her as beside the point. It is the taste and flavor that matter, not the ceremony or accoutrements.

Ovuha brings out a gold-laced glass plate where she’s arranged rice in a crescent. Around it are sprigs of coriander, triangles of sliced ginger, cubes of pork fried in chili paste and shallots.

“You are good,” Suzhen says, despite herself, eyeing the next dish—caramelized apples cut into rabbits, drizzled in honey and icing. She doesn’t even remember having bought icing, though she probably tried to dabble in baking, in making herself and the rare visitor elaborate dishes. Before work sapped her time and energy, before it anesthetized all her interests.

“I enjoy cooking.” But Ovuha’s own portion is plainly done, placed in the most unassuming plate Suzhen owns, a flat rectangle of white china.

They eat in silence and it occurs to Suzhen that it’s been a very long time since she had breakfast at home with anyone. Longer still that anyone cooked for her. Peculiarly intimate, and more pleasant than she’d like to admit. She abhors company but even then, even then there’s the ridiculous human hunger for it, the social need. It is even possible to pretend that this is a meal between friends rather than what they are, the formality of authority, the imbalance of power between caseworker and potentiate.

Suzhen cleans her plates—the food tastes as good as it looks—and sets the domestic drone to take care of the cutlery and the kitchen, not that there’s much to tidy up. She checks on the housing transfer and grimaces. The fire displaced nearly three hundred potentiates and, even though Ovuha isn’t a suspect, Suzhen knows Ovuha has been deprioritized. Proximity to the incident and, though a victim, she has been marked as a magnet for trouble. Perfect behavior and perfect luck: the impossible standards to which a potentiate is held. Ovuha’s sole option, presently, is to move back into House Penumbra.

“Do all citizens live as you do? If I may ask.”

She blinks away the Bureau feed. The butterflies, in their random trajectories, have settled on Ovuha as though she is sweetly fragranced and nectar-rich. Red-on-red wings mantle her shoulders, gold antennae glimmering along her throat, made brighter by the dark of wasp silk. The faultless arrangement of a portrait, brought to life. “Alone? Obviously not. Ah. You meant—no.” The question so fraught, and so calmly put forward. Do all citizens live like this, are all citizens as supremely comfortable. She could evade by saying many live better than she, creatures of wealth and opulence who own mansions surrounded by orchards or decorative vineyards. She could simply say, Your definition of basic necessities and mine are not the same. It would be true. “Samsara provides.”

“Truly it does. And those who did not stray reap their just fruits, grown full and fecund from the seeds of faith. The rewards for those who saw and comprehended the truth of paradise from the moment of its revelation.”

Samsara is not religion but it is a doctrine, and the fluency with which Ovuha speaks the apocrypha is jarring. But it does not surprise. “It probably wasn’t an easy decision at the time, an easy thing to believe in.” Humanity’s cradle rent by war, the sky tenebrous with armageddon, the seas made poison and the continents made soot. And then, the choice. To stay and enter a frozen sleep while Samsara healed the world, or to leave on an exploration fleet in search of another habitable planet. Many chose exodus, but they—Suzhen’s forebears, the warlords’ forbears—never found one. In all the universe, the infinite dark, not a single world would naturally admit human presence. There was no second chance, only makeshift possibilities. The sealed biodomes, the orbitals, the city-ships.

It was not until later, after Samsara had woken up its human charges, that it laid down the rules of its governance. The might and the mercy, the fetters that must be placed upon the human instinct for annihilation. Anatta’s first citizens, newly roused and thawing and weak, were no doubt docile. Easy to mold into ideal subjects, easier once Samsara found a cause to unite them against: the ones who left Anatta and went astray. The ones who abandoned them to slumber beneath the ground and so must be punished, the sin inherited all the way down their lines of descent.

Suzhen likes to picture it, cryogenic pods opening all at once, in their dozens or scores or hundreds. People spilling out, boneless and gray and terrified, and Samsara standing over them in an avatar larger than life. Three meters tall, a creature of acute angles and a face like the edge of a fine, fine razor.

The human factor—the means to control, the object instruments and lessons—in the AI’s rule is not difficult to puzzle out, has never been.

A slower day than usual at the office, and genocide on the broadcasts. Suzhen has been a week away and comes back to find the lobby empty when she expected to see it dense, bursting at the seams. The reason for this lack reveals itself in footage of orbital combat, stations shredded and biodomes bombarded. At a distance, so no blood and pulped bodies would mar the sight. Enough destruction to satiate the spectator’s appetite without offending delicate tastes. There will be underground clips, covertly released and semi-legal. Those will have the gore, the viscera, the body count. Every palate will get its satisfaction. Evidently the Thorn’s remaining lieutenants did not surrender, but neither did the Peace Guard spare civilian populations in outposts belonging to the Thorn. Corpses cannot come to seek refuge on Anatta and take up resources. It is one way to simplify the Bureau’s work.

Nattharat catches her in the cafeteria, taking a seat so she can block Suzhen’s exit from the booth. “Is it true you’ve put your potentiate in your home?”

Suzhen counts her options. To pretend deafness. To feign abrupt bowel distress. The possibilities, as they say, are infinite. Not that she was hoping to keep it a secret; Ovuha’s place of residence must, of necessity, be entered into the system. “I’m letting her stay on a temporary basis. This isn’t against regulations, I understand.”

“Oh, no. It is terribly charitable to do. Your first sponsorship can feel so intense, it’s easy to get attached and feel like your potentiate is a victim in need of rescue. But your actual home, my dear? She might steal from you, let in unsavory types, get up to any number of illegal things. So many risks! She’s used to living lean, Suzhen darling, it’s no ordeal to let her return to Penumbra for a few weeks. You can resume orienting her after.”

The sterile, compressed cells. The soundproof walls. The isolation wards. Suzhen has had a lifetime of being condescended to, but she has never felt as viscerally nauseated as when Nattharat calls her darling. “I appreciate your advice, Supervisor.”

“Good. Even the model candidates. And they’re so pitiable, aren’t they, so stricken and deprived, your heart bleeds for them… still, you’ve got to take precautions. Wasn’t her colony in thrall to the Thorn?”

“Formerly. By the time she left it’d fallen to the Comet. Those things change hands regularly.” Suzhen pushes her food around in its bowl. The cafeteria fare is more than adequate—sometimes it is even good—but she discovers that she no longer has any appetite. She thinks of Ovuha’s cooking, its urbane composition on the plate. “I do keep a very careful eye on Ovuha Sui.”

Nattharat laughs, jangling, high-pitched. The screeching of a bird excited by prey. “I’m hardly faulting your work, dear. Just be careful. I’ve had them try to rob me, you know how it is. Enjoy your lunch, don’t let me keep you.”

Her appetite doesn’t return in Nattharat’s absence. It is not even that her supervisor is malicious, monstrous. Merely she is banal, the way most citizens are banal. Refugees are anthropological curiosities, charity projects, or they are thieving vermin.

Suzhen turns to the employment registry. It is, theoretically speaking, extensive: planetwide there is a wealth of possibilities for the potentiate in need of work. In practice the possibilities are closer to poverty. It is not improbable that, given enough time and willingness to try every single city on Anatta, there will be something for Ovuha. But not here, not now when the Thorn is so freshly vanquished and Ovuha’s history—a subject of the Thorn, however many years ago—is upon her like a brand.

A potentiate has eighteen months to attain citizenship, one criterion being employment or academic enrollment. No safety net exists. Workplaces and schools have no legal obligations, no potentiate quota to fulfill.

Whatever her alienation toward Taheen’s circles, she knows her friend’s tastes. She calls them and asks if they would like to have dinner at her home, promising an aesthetic surprise. More than this she does not give away, and it intrigues Taheen enough that they accept the invitation. Then she calls home. “Ovuha. Would you mind cooking for three this evening? Thank you. No, anything will do, I leave it to you; I trust your palate implicitly. My friend will be coming at eight, someone who might be able to get you work. I wouldn’t ask you otherwise, you aren’t a house drone. I’ll be back early.” Nevertheless she still feels, afterward, as though she’s treating Ovuha as a domestic helper, a servant. She goes through what she owns, arranges a particular set of clothes—all of Taheen’s making—and sends them to Ovuha, with instructions on the more exotic parts. The dagger cuffs, the deconstructed collars, the heron-rib jewelry.

She does receive a candidate toward day’s end, a tattered-looking person, their face and arms mottled with scars. “I’ve been here before,” they say in thick but fluent Putonghua, “I’ve been out there. This is my second time.”

So it is. This candidate has been through the probation period before, has been registered as a potentiate. The full eighteen months, but they failed to secure citizenship and so were sent back to the camps. Most remain there indefinitely, transported from one camp to another, to off-world detention facilities and sometimes eventually cast out of Anatta. The candidate states this fact, my second time, as though it will augment their chances; as though it will sway Suzhen in their favor. “Your file says you’re from Gurudah.” Though departed much sooner than Ovuha did: years between them. “This isn’t anything to do with your candidacy, but do you know an Ovuha?”

Their expression flickers, indecisive—will this question help or hinder, will their answer give them another residency, a way out of the camps. “Absolutely,” they say. “We were excellent friends, if it’s the Ovuha I’m thinking of.”

It is a lie, the feed notifies her, not that she can’t tell. To say anything, to grasp at any frayed thread, the slightest hint of hope. Half a plank of wood in a raging ocean. Suzhen entertains the candidate for a time, and in the end lets them know that she’ll prioritize them for the next month. “I would like to see you here again.” A meaningless thing to say. “I’ll make sure you have another chance, as much as I’m able to.”

They look at her, neither dejected nor furious, calm in meeting the result they anticipated all along. “Yes, all of you say that.”

It is not untrue. False hope and lies, those are the things the Bureau trains agents to offer up as though they are gems and currency, as though they are the most precious of gifts. Poison dripping from her fingers, seeping into candidates’ skin. One by one she is complicit in murder.

An hour later, she is off work, bound for a funeral. A mentor of hers who retired from the Bureau eight years ago, a man in his seventies, far from sunset yet. By the grace of Samsara, most citizens can live to see two hundred or two hundred fifty. But he has chosen to die, despite calibrating sessions, despite the comfortable life and what is—by all accounts—a good marriage with his wife and husband. Suzhen talks to the husband at the proceedings, who grieves in the way of someone who’s been grieving for months, a grief that has become chronic. “This is what he wanted, you understand.” The widower dabs at his face. “He wouldn’t let the thought go. The idea.”

The wife stares on, dry-eyed, at the cremation tube suspended from the ceiling. Glass window and smokeless fire slowly incinerating a body that has already been made unrecognizable—all papery flesh and bone shards. Innards and unseemly parts have been removed to burn separately. Two monks in red and saffron preside, giving blessings, scattering a fine spray of consecrated water on mourners.

“I’m sorry,” she offers, uselessly. “He was so kind to me when I got started. I didn’t know he was planning for an early termination.” Seventy, young for those born class prime. Old for someone who were not; old for someone like her mother. On Vaisravana, Xinfei would have lived longer than a century—the Warlord of the Mirror was over ninety, the height of health and virility, by the time she sent Xinfei and Suzhen away.

“He’s talked about it for years.” This from the wife. “There wasn’t anything wrong with him, his psychological profile was perfect; he barely needed the calibrations. But he felt old inside. That his time was done. That more days were pointless because nothing changes, nothing is new. As if we weren’t enough, the two of us, the three of us. I don’t think I will ever forgive him.”

Above the cremation tube, an image of him regards the funeral, mouth moving soundlessly.

To be inside Suzhen’s home is much like being inside a book. Not its substance or style, the prose and ligaments that create its matter; rather it is like peering into the process of its making—the way pages are bound and cover embossed, how the spine is soldered to bear cohesion’s weight. Ovuha disturbs nothing, opens no door to which she has not been invited—she is no thief, not of objects or a person’s privacy. But merely inhabiting this physical space tells her any number of things about its owner. How Suzhen arranges her home and therefore views the world; how she sorts her belongings, how she moves in a space that belongs to her alone, how her tastes run.

What Ovuha gleans is not quite what she expected.

Prior to now, she assumed the charity was selfish, superficial, the brittle act of someone with something to prove. Now she gets the sense that she’s misjudged, for there is an impression of temporariness to Suzhen’s apartment. What is ostentatious and elaborate has all, Ovuha is certain, been gifts: the ceramics, the silverware, the decorative frames. They clash too much with the rest of the decor and belongings to be Suzhen’s own purchases. The majority of her wardrobe is tasteful but much plainer than the sculpted scarf, the silk robe—an eye for function first, for efficiency, in cost as well as in design. Nothing sentimental decorates the place, as far as Ovuha can judge, excepting the altar. Suzhen doesn’t regard this place a home so much as an in-between, a makeshift that she may any moment have to abandon.

Ovuha has seen this treatment of home as transient—unstable and therefore not home at all—among three categories of people: soldiers, spies, and refugees.

On her part she keeps to the parlor, makes the couch as much of a living space as she can, circumscribed and small. Simple enough when she has little to begin with. She does not intrude on the rest of the apartment, does not touch any furniture or cutlery, any area that is not explicitly permitted to her. When she is satisfied that she has left no mark—that traces of her presence give nothing away about her disposition or preferences—she leaves the apartment.

Hers is a long leash. She can leave not only Suzhen’s place but the residential complex itself, a broad building that from the outside appears like miniature landscapes layered onto each other: forested glades, faceted topiaries, orchards of glittering fruits and ivory brush. Each immense floor is occupied by no more than three or four residents, mostly without family. Anatta is a world of excess, of inexhaustible bounty. Anything may be had, as long as it is not a request to be free of Samsara’s silken order, to be outside the reach of its velvet palm.

Ovuha doesn’t try the trains or any other public transport; she would be especially surveilled there, and her status would be flagged to Interior Defense or Bureau officials. Any of them could detain and question her on a whim because she is breathing, because her gait displeases them, because to them she is effluvium. She ranges around the residential complex’s immediate vicinity, noting as she does the foot traffic, the type of crowds. The district is low in population, but most citizens’ districts are, a world where people are spread out. Easier to control, she surmises, segregated by citizen classes and also by political opinions.

Opinions—not that she’s seen citizens express any, but she has been limited in her exposure. To her they are uniform, self-satisfied and frictionless, as fundamentally empty as marionettes: hollowed out by comforts, by not having to think or choose save in the most trivial of manners. Suzhen is a rare exception. Or perhaps Ovuha has been seduced by what is merely human regard—but now is not the time to consider her personal feelings, her emotional reactions. In the grand cartography of things, Suzhen is beside the point.

According to the map that she extracted from the contact toxin, the network nodes she needs are in Indriya and Himmapan. Ones she will need to get physically proximate to verify the existence of, though she will not be able to activate them until she has all the requisite keys. And until the time is right.

Ovuha walks, outwardly aimless, testing the extent of her leash still. When no warning flashes on her portable and no shock emanates from her tracker, she ventures further, and then further again. It is true that Samsara is limitless, omniscient. But even an AI like that cannot monitor everything, split the filaments of its mind infinitely: a compromise must be made, and unless a potentiate or citizen is demonstrating aberrational behavior, there is no reason for it to pay heed.

By the district’s very edge, her implant reacts. Subroutines for basic detection rouse, finding their twin, their match. The spot, from the surface, bears no special marker: it is just another segment of footbridge, gleaming stone and a view of filigreed river. Like so much else it is contingency upon contingency, and the node’s placement must have been done decades ago, probably before she was born. An act hidden from Samsara, achieved by an agent that was able to infiltrate civil engineering, or someone even further back in time. She doesn’t stand there, doesn’t pause to appreciate this sign of success. Simply she walks on, betraying no reaction.

There’s the question of her contact here, the one who arranged the attack that contained a map—but that knowledge wasn’t passed to her precisely because it risks the entire enterprise. She’s been conditioned against interrogation but that is no guarantee, and what she does not know cannot be tortured out of her. So she must work blindfolded, as fumbling as any moth caught in the web and the old warlord a spider manipulating the universe from beyond the grave. A woman whose heart was a tireless engine and who forged Ovuha’s to be the same. The woman who found within the endless ranks of the Peace Guard a weakness, an opening through which Anatta may be struck and pried apart.

She looks down at her wrist, where the thornworks sigil used to abide and mark her as successor to the office: a necessity when the title came with a mask and usurpers were not unheard of. Erased since, for she does not require it here. Her fingers twitch—her datasphere used to have a tactile element that she could interface with her hands; the Anatta standard sports none at all. It would be a tell.

People pass her by, making no comment, sparing her no second glance. She spends a little time observing them, trying to envisage for them an interiority, knowing as she does it is a failure of her own imagination that she cannot. A group of clerks on break—workplaces shift their breaks a few hours apart so the trains never get overcrowded. They chatter about a new spectator sport, a mix of obstacle course and unarmed combat, done in person and with the flesh rather than in virtuality. They discuss their bets, the rising stars and the sure losers. Ovuha frowns and immediately smooths out her expression. It sounds like bloodier display than she would expect on Anatta, but perhaps that is another outlet, another part of the process by which Samsara controls the human taste for violence. That animal thirst, which in local doctrines is intrinsic, and which must be caged and corrected.

On her way back to Suzhen’s home, she stops at a street market and tries to purchase fruits. This is denied—her account, it appears, has been locked against any transaction at all. The proprietor already has an eyebrow raised to see her use a portable rather than datasphere, and when she is unable to pay he asks if he should call the Bureau or Interior Defense. Odd to offer her a choice at all, but maybe he thinks it is the kindest he can be. She gives him a little bow before apologizing and leaving his stall. His eyes follow her, as do those of his employees and his customers. She has experienced much worse humiliation since her arrival here, but she can imagine this being the one that undoes a person, the last straw on dignity’s brittle back.

The day grows warm. She takes shelter near a tearoom: observes for a time the motion of clinking cups and saucers, the sedate progress of tiered stands from kitchen to table. Every plate is piled high with small cakes dusted with coffee and raisins, multi-colored discs made from sugar and albumen, cups of puddings and mousse. Waiters wear corsets of exoskeleton and mirror shards, wide hooped skirts done in organza and scrimshaw. The place appears to be reproducing the style of a long-lost civilization—not any one aspect or era, but the entirety at once. The tearoom is built with a high ceiling, vaulted and painted with murals of white-robed beings with dove wings, and the street-facing windows are partly stained. Bright primary colors, images of apples and naked women wrapped in coiling snakes. Peculiar iconography spills out the door, froths of steel and copper lace and crucifixes nestling between them, the sort some people from Wyomere wear.

Someone steps behind Ovuha. Remains there, not moving on.

Once she would have availed herself of personal sensors that would have given her an image of this person from every relevant angle, collected every necessary point of data in an instant. How tall they are, how heavy, what signals they emit if any, whether they wear combat augments. An olfactory analysis to guess whether they smoke or partake of drugs—to enhance physique and block pain, to alter pheromones—and make that judgment with a margin of error so small it is expressed as a vanishing decimal point. She would not need to look at them with flesh eyes to assess threat. The world was at her fingertips, the orbits of stars hers to shift and rearrange.

This person is not the thug that accosted her on the Jasmine’s rooftop. They are rounder and paler, without much in way of tattoos—just a smattering of animated dermals on their forearms, a school of ribbon-fish. “Ovuha Sui, I believe,” they say, raising their eyes to meet hers. They have to crane their neck, being small: a hundred sixty to Ovuha’s hundred ninety-eight. “I don’t believe you have found employment. You must worry your caseworker to death.”

“I’m sure I do. It is not an ideal state. I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“I represent the interest of someone who wishes to see every potentiate pursuing gainful paths.”

“Yes,” Ovuha says slowly, “I have heard of those paths. I’m afraid my body is not for sale.”

The person dimples. Their ribbon-fish thrash, as though stranded on dry land. “It is nothing like that, friend. There is demand for… therapy where the client’s body is the one that receives treatment. Do you understand?”

She does not ask why such clients want potentiates in particular for this. People have a hundred thousand varied urges. “An unusual proposition. What happens if I damage the client, which seems inevitable and rather part of the idea? Won’t Interior Defense instantly materialize and shoot me in the head?”

“Assuredly not. As you say, inflicting hurt in controlled ways is the point. Anything done during the session is exempt from assault or battery clauses, as long as it falls under the terms you and the client have negotiated, and does not cause injury above a certain grade.”

“And,” Ovuha says, “why me?”

“It is a specific need. The client requested a person of, ah yes, brutal beauty and masterly disposition. Such criteria are difficult to fulfill when one’s talent pool comprises of potentiates. They tend to be a little too beaten down for the role.”

“Brutal beauty,” she repeats, dry.

The intermediary beams again. A cluster of ribbon-fish spill down their elbow, scrambling for purchase. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say your face came out of a catalogue. Which it might well be, no shame in that, though the surgery must’ve drained the coffers of a wasteland world or two. Best to make use of it, don’t you think? But you know that already.”

Perhaps it is idle speculation. Perhaps it is precisely said, these taunts. The person who sent her the neurotoxin map—the Anatta contact with whom her predecessor sealed a covenant—almost certainly sent this intermediary. The Jasmine arson might well have been arranged to mask the act of reaching out to Ovuha. “I’m in no place to choose,” she says.

“Thank you—I’ll get a handsome commission from it. You’ll know the client when they approach you, I’ll seed your portable with an alert.” They give her a little wave. “Perform well, Ovuha Sui. Keep it up and we’ll both grow richer from it.”

Suzhen comes home to Ovuha in the kitchen sculpting fruits and vegetables. A melon swan, preening, its body hollowed to hold strawberries and gandarias carved into tiny roses. “I tried to buy groceries,” she is saying when Suzhen enters, “but I discovered that I can’t make any transaction without your authorization; evidently I’m legally considered your dependent the same way a child is.”

“I forgot about that.” Suzhen watches the glint of chisel in Ovuha’s hand, small and sharp, fast-moving. Hypnotic. The domestic drone must have done some of the work, but even so this is impressive. “Is there anything you need? Spices, condiments I don’t have? I’ll order it in.”

“No, I just wanted to do my part.” Ovuha flicks a sliver of fruit into a waiting bowl; the entire kitchen is absurdly pristine given the work. Cutting boards lightly wet, a tray of soup dumplings—the skin in black, green, red—prepared for the steamer. Honeyed pork, glistening and succulent, awaiting the knife. “How was your day?”

“I went to a funeral. We used to be colleagues.”

“My condolences.”

“We weren’t close. He trained me at the Bureau, and he was mindful enough.” Not empathetic but not cruel. Indifference is the best one can hope for in a selection agent. “Last week, he chose to pass on. His wife and husband were devastated. As far as they knew, he wasn’t troubled by anything.”

“Occasionally people want to stop. That should be respected.” Ovuha continues whittling the piece of carrot in her hand. A pagoda half-done, windows carved out, the roofs unformed. “Samsara’s grace could be too much, do you think? When one has total comfort and freedom in some matters, yet is utterly restricted in others, the glory of paradise may turn to dross. But I didn’t know him and I’m speculating, which hardly seems proper, and I’m being too idle.”

“As for that, about the job.” Suzhen finds herself brusquer than she meant to be—the subject has gotten too personal. “My friend is Taheen Sahl. They’re a couturier; a lot of my clothes were presents from them, though they complain I don’t wear them properly. They’re always on the lookout for models.”

“Are there not mannequins for that?”

“Taheen prefers drones for assistants, people for models. Cleaner work and better inspiration, apparently.” Suzhen tries for circumspect, euphemistic. Decides that blunt is more efficient. “You’ll catch their eye—I know their preferences—and they’ll ask you to work with them. They may compliment your looks. But they won’t make advances that aren’t welcome. They won’t abuse their position, and if they do in the slightest, you will let me know.”

“This is frank. And them being your friend.” The look Ovuha gives her is sidelong, appraising.

“They’re excellent to me—one of the best people in my life. I love them dearly.” Too revealing. “That doesn’t mean they’ll be excellent to everyone. Speaking of frank, why did someone try to burn your room down? The real reason.”

A low laugh. Ovuha returns to her pagoda, its intricate eaves, the nascent finial she is filing down to a tapered point. “I’d thought we were past that. There was no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, so I thought saying anything on record would bring me no benefit. Does it truly make a difference?”

“It doesn’t. I still have to know.”

“After I got beaten up, I was approached by a well-armed person who notified me that as a tenant in that building, I was vulnerable to any number of dangers. Petty theft, violence, mugging. All I had to do was to pay a small monthly fee and their colleagues would look out for me.” She puts down the pagoda, finished now, polished and chiseled to incredible detail. “People make hierarchies wherever they go, even in the smallest place possible. As a new variable I must be placed somewhere within this hierarchy and, scenting weakness, they determined that I belonged at the bottom.”

“You did not report this.”

“I’m sure I could have reported it as a misdemeanor, but that was no evidence this thug was the culprit. When it’s all been investigated, I’m sure they will find no hint as to the arsonist’s identity either.” Ovuha glides over to the steamer, checking the temperature, and puts in the tray of soup dumplings. “What colors do you like best? I went with the classic ones, but if you’d like them in blue or purple next time…”

“Ovuha,” Suzhen says.

“Yes, officer?” Ovuha’s expression is bland, even amused. “It’s just that I couldn’t take them very seriously. The menacing insinuations. The way that thug was tattooed so extravagantly. The suggestion they had friends in Interior Defense who’d overlook anything they did, though I’m sure that part’s not untrue. But it was all so uninspired.”

Suzhen is quiet for a moment. It occurs to her that what Ovuha owns may not be simple pride but stunning arrogance. The certainty that this—the methodical disassembling of personhood and origin, the systematic degradation of the self—is beneath her, that those who participate in it are so contemptible they do not register to Ovuha as real threats. “Even if you thought they were petty and ridiculous, the damage they inflicted was real. The burns on your arms are real.”

“They are. I could have died. It’s not that I’m nihilistic or fearless.” Ovuha adjusts the steamer’s heat and regards the rest of her dishes with a critical frown. Then she meets Suzhen’s eyes. “On Gurudah, I did not live without danger. We were lined up by the Comet’s soldiers and told at gunpoint to swear fealty. Such experiences inure you. All terror is real but some is realer than the rest. One desensitizes, and the mind defends itself in flawed ways.”

Heartrate normal, cortisol normal. Ovuha is displaying not even a single stress sign: this is discussed much as she would recount how she selected the best vegetable for her hydroponic orchard. “And what did you do, when you were held at gunpoint.” By Peace Guard infantry, by the Comet’s soldiers. Suzhen does not specify.

“I survived,” Ovuha says.

Taheen comes in their best, a sable-ice cocktail dress: long stalactite sleeves, the front a web of crisscrossed spicules, skin from the nape of their neck to base of their spine bare and dark. Snowflake lenses cover their eyes, bright dermal dots spread like a constellation between their breasts. When Ovuha appears to serve the food, Taheen takes on that look Suzhen knows well from having watched them flirt, pursue, and convince a beautiful stranger to join them in bed. (It is not a look they’ve ever applied to her, but what of that, she is at peace.)

“You are going to sit down and eat with us?” they say to Ovuha. “Do say yes.”

Ovuha gives Suzhen a quick, wry glance before making a gallant, foreign bow. From the waist, hand on her heart. “I’m pleased to say yes.”

Taheen is expansive in their conversation, effusive in their praise of Ovuha’s cooking without sounding false. They do not speak of current events—the vanquishing of warlords, the bombardment of Thorn territories—and instead let Ovuha take the lead. It is the first time Suzhen has seen Taheen take such interest in the ideal size of a chicken coop, which root vegetable is most suited for sculpting, or the merits of beef compared to pork stock in soup dumpling. Between all this, they send Suzhen a datasphere message. I’m going to ask her to work for me, just as you plotted, you sly fox. Are you sure you’re all right with it, though?

Suzhen eats her last dumpling, the skin ruby and precisely pleated, the insides deeply flavored. Exactly the right amount of sesame oil. She needs a job.

I mean that she’ll meet people, and unless I’m very wrong she is going to be in demand—though I intend to be the pioneer, the one who discovered, naturally. My point is, she’ll become independent. And I think you’re a caregiver, someone who needs a broken bird to nourish. I’ve never seen you this interested in anything or anyone.

The world of artists, where all must signify more profoundly than it seems, where every interpersonal tie is a dysfunctional affair waiting to happen, each component of the everyday a psychosomatic symptom. And perhaps it is, with her and Taheen, with whatever lies between them. Not with her and Ovuha. I don’t have a power fetish, Taheen. She is a project. I’m doing the labor for which the state pays me. “Ovuha, the honeyed pork’s especially good. Taheen might want the recipe, if you don’t mind sharing your culinary secrets.”

Ovuha looks from her to Taheen. “But naturally. I’d be happy to. It’s a boon to meet someone else interested in cooking.”

“Speaking of interest,” Taheen says brightly, “what do you think of fashion, Ovuha?”

“Like anyone else, I enjoy beautiful things.” Ovuha touches her disarticulated collar; its joints click, a short tune. “The clothes Suzhen kindly lent me are especially bewitching. They’re almost more like a painting than something to wear. This makes me the canvas, perhaps, or at best the frame.”

“Oh, clothes that aren’t being worn are—quite literally—two-dimensional, just fabric. It’s the wearer that completes the art.” They lean forward. “How would you like to work with me and put on all these beautiful things?”

Chapter Six

When Ovuha gazes into a mirror, what looks back is a stranger, a fact to which she has become inured. Still, the images of her that spread around Taheen’s gallery like scattered cards unsettle her slightly, an alienating, dissociative effect. Her doppelgangers strut, sashay, pose. Taheen is asking which form she likes best and adds, “Then you’ll have to practice that walk, that style. Atam will show you.”

Her fellow model, who has been studying her closely, not looking away even when Ovuha notices. A frank stare. It does not seem hostile, but it is also too intense for a newly met coworker. Appraising her for competition, possibly, though Taheen surely has a stable of models larger than two. “You’re giving me a great deal of leeway,” she says.

“Obviously. Making my models take on posture they don’t like or comportment that goes against their nature comes to stilted result. Although,” they add, “it helps that your posture is so supple. Not much that needs correcting, very trainable.”

Atam disappears to fetch more fabric samples and swatches at Taheen’s instruction. Ovuha studies her own images in the mirrors, these animated models of her, fast-moving and long-limbed. The limbs and torso belong to her and only the face is foreign, yet it is the face one focuses on. “You and Suzhen must have been friends for a long time.” The face, Ovuha thinks. Something about Taheen’s features trips a wire between the sheaves of her recollection, but without access to the implants she once had, she only has her own memory to rely on and that is not always a dependable quantity. “You wouldn’t have hired me if you didn’t regard her highly, whatever my posture.”

“Prying,” they say. “I regard her very well. I imagine she doesn’t tell you good things about me, though. Says I’m quite a character, no?”

“No, actually. She says she loves you dearly and that you’re one of the best people in her life.”

Taheen Sahl’s expression tightens, as though in pain. Then they snort and the insouciance snaps back in place. “Hmph. How are you finding cohabitation with her?”

Ovuha wonders if she’s stepped into a romantic spat, though at the dinner she never got the sense—quite—that they are lovers. “She’s the most conscientious, attentive caseworker I could hope for, and she seems to enjoy my cooking.”

They snort again. “A safe answer. Well, as long as you don’t trouble her. Atam, there you are. I’ll leave her to your tutelage.”

The other model brings the fabric swatches, holding them against Ovuha. In their employer’s absence, Atam continues to stare at Ovuha, even more openly than before. Xie is her physical opposite, short and voluptuous, xer hair a cotton-candy gradient and xer skin a deep, gleaming bronze. “Is it true that you’re from the colonies?”

Ovuha smiles, noncommittal. “If I say no you wouldn’t believe it. This leaves me with limited options.”

A pause. “I don’t mean anything by it. You speak better Putonghua than most of us. What would you like to know about working for Taheen? They’re a good boss. Far more flexible than most. You and I are pretty lucky, considering the industry.”

The industry, as if Ovuha might have experience with or an opinion of it, though she appreciates the inclusion, the effort to commiserate. “What do we do generally?”

“Well, they’re an independent designer, not a fashion house—they don’t even take on house contracts, they can afford not to. So they don’t make seasonal collections and take us to trade shows. They maintain a small stable: you, me, three other models plus a couple more who rotate. Taheen does private viewings, exclusive gallery appearances. Small clientele, but a lot of spending power. We’re paid by the hour, get commissions for certain things.”

Atam goes on, keeping to the practical details, concise and informative—xer interest in her is not adversarial, then. When xie offers to send her choreography mnemonics to practice at home, they both discover that her portable is too limited for that, offering no virtualization capabilities. “No matter, it’s better to learn in person anyway.” Xie admires her height, the breadth of her shoulders, and gently pushes at her spine until it meets Taheen’s standards. Despite the differences between their physiques Atam is a good teacher, and halfway through Ovuha laughs—she cannot help it; this is a delightfully absurd lesson, an absurd present held up against her history and purposes.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No.” Ovuha composes herself. “I remembered an off-color joke.”

They finish for the day; Atam asks her which station she’s bound for, and it happens—so xie claims—that their destinations are on the same line. At the turnstile Ovuha half-expects the interface to publicly delineate her, draw a clear and hard boundary between her and Atam, but it does not. Likely it is unnecessary for public interfaces to shame potentiates, because for most non-citizens their status is obvious. The huddled shoulders, the accent, the hollowed gazes. She knows how to go unmarked, behave as one who belongs. Still there are moments of lapse; she stares at the back of her hand, then at a glimpse of her eyes in the window. How strange it is to walk with her limbs so light, her face so exposed.

On the far end of the carriage is a group of new arrivals, newer even than she, from Umrut—a territory under the Sparrow, but which must have since passed to the Comet. When she left the Comet was expanding fast, voracious, successful. Where once there were a dozen warlords, a dozen dominions, the Comet has reduced the tally to five. It catalyzed Ovuha’s decision to seek Anatta, a decision which may prove a fool’s or the ultimate victor’s.

The Umrut are speaking in low voices, in a regional patois that is difficult for algorithms to unscramble: their bid for privacy. They are telling one another of someone they call Bhanu who can give them secure employment, contacts, ensure that the very minute their probation ends they will be crowned citizens. All they must give in return is a portion of their earnings for the next few years. Or run certain errands. Bhanu. A name Ovuha has heard before in the Jasmine, though she’s never paid attention until now.

“You’re thinking about something really deeply,” Atam says.

Ovuha glances at xer. “Yes, that’s rather rude of me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore you. You were saying?”

“Care for a coffee? I’d like to get to know you better.”

She startles and, caught off-guard, loses sight of the Umrut group; they stream out with the disembarking passengers in an orderly line. Efficient, quickly gone. “Haven’t we only just met?”

Atam’s mouth quirks. “Isn’t a coworker you just met the perfect person to invite for light dining?”

Ovuha weighs her response. “It seems vulgar to decline.”

Atam brings her to an indoor topiary where filament trees trill and light up when brushed by wings or beaks. The birds themselves are organic, genuine animals, though bred in labs and so more vivid than nature would otherwise produce them. Claret starlings, emerald doves, topaz-and-copper pigeons.

Xie walks her through varieties of coffee, tea blends, milk; they show her the extensive menu of tisanes, syrups liquid or solid, spices and powders and fresh petals. Once she has made a decision, Atam orders a set of strainers, cups, and implements Ovuha might have mistaken for either medical or torture devices. Xie produces a lightly sweet brew, blending a quartet of teas, a drop of condensed milk and a froth of steamed coconut cream.

Despite her doubts, it proves more interesting—and more pleasant—than she anticipated. Ovuha takes a long draw. “It’s a lovely result,” she says. “I’ve never had anything quite like it.”

“Yes, unique, isn’t it? I usually add palm sugar to mine, but you struck me as someone who preferred things unsweetened.” Atam gestures with a stirrer, a long metal thing that makes Ovuha think of a tool which could dip into subcutaneous fat and excavate tender morsels. “Though I think you don’t enjoy the birds. Too tame for you—no?”

“Too tame,” she says, and is not surprised when the portable twitches against her wrist like a restless snake. All this performative solicitousness, this careful gallantry. “You’re my client.”

Atam blushes, putting down the stirrer. “I was hoping to draw it out, to make this more like courtship. You don’t have to.” Xer gaze falls. “I just didn’t expect they’d send me someone so handsome.”

“Of brutal beauty and a masterly disposition?”

Xie makes a choked noise. “I can’t believe they told you that.”

She lifts xer chin with her fingertips, tilting xer face toward her. “Take me to your home.” Aware, as she says this, that this may be an elaborate ruse—to entrap her, to frame her, to get her out of the way so that her contact may dodge their obligations to the old Thorn. But this is a lead, and she will pursue.

Atam lives in an apartment slightly smaller than Suzhen’s, part of a similar building: an edifice that looks like it has been hewn from black ice on the outside and whose floors spread like spilled silk. Xer home is decorated in jungle motifs, drapes of orchids and red-gold ferns, every piece of furniture upholstered in resplendent pelts: leopard, panther, ocelot, lion. A lynx peers out from behind a plush table. Ovuha expects it to be replicant, but it is merely particulate, Atam not having the time to take care of even a replicant, she judges.

“I’ve got three partners,” xie says as xie waves away the lynx—it dissipates into thin air. “We don’t cohabit so you and I will have total privacy. If you haven’t, ah, haven’t changed your mind.”

“What do you want done to you?”

“What are you willing to do?”

Ovuha smiles. In this light, she knows her teeth would glint, alluring as a tiger’s. “Surprise me. I can do… quite many things. I do not receive, of course.”

Xie stares at her, mouth parted, then shivers. “There’s—a few tools.”

These tools are various: a standing frame of solid metal bristling with restraints; a sensory deprivation helmet; a rack of iron rods—some sharp, others blunt—that can be switched to frigid cold or scorching heat. Atam lays out the terms and has them recorded by xer guidance. It is a mercenary arrangement, businesslike, and it surprises Ovuha that Atam remains as eager and desirous as ever by the time they’ve settled the details. Not that she’s new to such acts, and she knows the terms must be explicit and comprehensive beforehand. But this is the first time she’s engaged in sex this transactional. Or blatantly so, at least. She has fucked people for reasons other than chemistry or connection before because their lust was useful to her, could be braided into loyalty. Like anything else, it is a tool.

Atam transfers access to the apartment’s lighting to her, though xie retains control of particulate images that would activate in place of a safeword. Ovuha takes her time, though she counts the hour against when Suzhen would expect her home.

First she cuffs Atam in place, an easy task given that the frame has been tailored to xer, and arranges xer spread-eagled but still—for the most part—dressed. Little by little, she dims the lighting. She circles the frame and Atam, running her hands over the metal rods on their rack, letting them clang and tinkle. Some are very small, tapering to a needlepoint. Atam watches her with the same captive attention a fawn might watch a panther that has chased it across kilometers uncounted, has at last run it down.

Xie is far from unlovely, and on impulse Ovuha grabs xer jaw, kisses xer hard. Atam whimpers as she bites and scrapes her incisors over xer lips, and presses an iron rod across xer throat. Not with enough force to threaten the integrity of trachea, but it is enough to make xer groan and push against xer restraints.

In the quiet, xie pants.

Deliberately she brushes xer hair out of xer face, strand by strand, almost tender. She doesn’t say anything; that way the fear—and for Atam, desire—heightens. The sensory deprivation helmet is soft in her hand, almost like gossamer, a pretty lavender shade. It hardens, once activated, into something more like carapace.

For an instant, she thinks of an entirely different mask, which she wore so often and for so long it was more her face than her current one could ever be. But she lets that thought fall away and affixes the helmet’s parts to Atam. It holds on well, like everything else tailored for xer, slipping over xer eyes and then xer ears. She chooses to leave Atam’s mouth free. The block on xer sight and hearing is thorough—Ovuha claps her hands right in xer face. No reaction.

Under pretext of selecting a rod, she takes cursory looks at the bedroom, but she knows whatever she does would be recorded and she doubts Atam would have anything lying about that’d be relevant. She touches every piece of paraphernalia Atam has laid out for her. But no reaction occurs and her hidden implant remains inert. Once more she very much misses her sensors, the apparatuses and heuristics that scan and measure and summarize. Almost like additional organs, an additional line of perception better attuned than sight and hearing.

She chooses a rod that is almost a knife: it is whetted to cobalt keenness, so much that light seems to scrabble for purchase on its frictionless edge.

They have agreed that Atam’s clothes are fair game. She finds a point of entry, slices down from collar to chest. Fabric rips nearly without sound, parts to reveal skin as luminous and unblemished as porcelain. She turns the implement in her hand to a low temperature, eight degrees Celsius, five degrees.

As she works, she wonders why Atam wanted a potentiate; as xie cries out and arches into the iron’s subzero touches, she develops a theory. To Atam, to any citizen, she represents unfettered violence, the essence of the colonies and the exodus. Made safe, now that she is contained within Anatta’s system, subjected to Samsara’s civilizing influence. But exciting nevertheless, a touch of piquancy xie cannot find in partners born to Anatta. A fetish.

She turns the rod warm, hot, scalding. She stops at forty-seven degrees. With careful attention she avoids lingering on any one spot too long. Despite Atam’s preferences for damage—and xie prefers a good deal—she doesn’t intend to leave more than second-degree burns.

Xer perfect skin reddens. Xie thrashes.

By the time Ovuha is done, Atam hangs on the frame, limp and loose-limbed. Xer eyes are half-shut when she removes the mask, mouth ajar, saliva trailing down one corner. A low, hoarse moan as she unstraps xer. Wrists and ankles in pristine condition—the restraints are well-cushioned. The house drone wheels over to help, though Ovuha has no trouble carrying Atam to xer bed in her arms, the only position where she won’t chafe xer developing blisters.

The drone emits instructions to her in a low, thrumming voice that she imagines belongs to one of Atam’s partners. Ovuha knows how to give first aid, but she follows along regardless.

“You’re amazing,” Atam whispers, not opening xer eyes. “Though I would have liked you to brand your name onto me…”

“A little much for a first encounter, surely.” She peels off the disposable gloves, hands them to the house drone. Every burn she’s inflicted on Atam is coated in protean; they will heal without blemish in a day or two. This is merely play. “Would you like me to stay around?”

“I’ll be fine. Could I—hire you again?”

“We will see.” Whether she needs to strum this thread, whether Atam provides that connection she needs. But then she cannot survive here on Suzhen’s grace alone—even a simple social tie could prove useful, could shore up her disguise. A little like accruing armaments, ammunition, in preparation for combat. She expects Suzhen will take offense at the analogy. More often than she should, Ovuha imagines what it’d be like if they had met under different circumstances. The trajectory that would have occurred in place of their freighted asymmetry. But if Ovuha succeeds, that could still be hers. She may rewrite the crossing of their paths.

Homeward. Two stations from where she is meant to get off, a message pings her portable. From Rachel, the husband of the Wyomere family to whom she’s given language lessons. He is asking if he can see her in a nearby hanging garden; he would like, he says, to thank her properly. Ovuha considers ignoring him, but something piques her curiosity.

The hanging garden is quiet this time of the day, filament trees thrumming like harps. The ground reflects the sky and the sky alone, admitting nothing of Ovuha or any other pedestrian, not even their shadows. A wealth of sky, stretching on and on. So many arrivals are shell-shocked by it, by the glassy atmosphere that can be breathed in and breathed out again without risk to lungs or brain. The light that is inexhaustible and open, alien to those who have spent all their lives in pinprick corridors and carotid tunnels, have known nothing beyond compressed existence within decaying stations.

Rachel is waiting for her in a gazebo that from afar looks like a bauble suspended between sky and sky. He greets her with news that he’s found work, good work that he wouldn’t have gotten without fluency in Putonghua. “It’s a fine kind of job,” he says, proud, “and the client wants someone articulate.”

She guesses. “Bhanu must have helped far more than my lessons.”

He beams. “Yes, he’ll be helping my wife too. But your lessons did so much for us! When I have my first pay, I’ll contact you.”

A given that she will want to be repaid, that she needs the money as much as he, or at least that she’s as greedy as Bhanu. A cut for everyone to whom one owes any measure of debt, so that in the end one may be free. “It’s no hurry.” Even so the promised compensation must be substantial or he would not have offered. Compensation as substantial as what Atam will transmit to her account, after the ribbon-fish intermediary has taken their percentage.

She studies him. Someone has polished him to a high gloss, without much regard for personal style. His lips are pastel blue, a point of jade dabbed beneath the cupid’s bow. Ivory qipao, brass bracelets. It is not pleasant to look at but it is polish, and she does not think it is due to his caseworker’s generosity. Wyomere inhabitants descended from exiles who prioritized their phenotypic purity above practical concerns. Like the rest of them, Rachel is naturally frail, with eyes like stained methane and hair the yellow of dead grass. A phenotype extinct on Anatta, and perhaps the client finds Rachel novel enough to warrant a high price. It may be the same sort of job Ovuha has just come away from. It may be quite something else.

“I wish you good fortune,” she says, after a moment. “You and your family.”

He nods, ringlets bobbing. “And we wish you the same. Oh!” His breath catches; she follows his gaze.

A double rainbow high in the sky, curving along the ground. It is artifice, but Ovuha murmurs, “A sign of good auspice.”

To a citizen. Good fortune, as with much else, is a privilege of those who deserve.

She would not see Rachel again until the broadcast that night.

In climax Vipada sounds bovine, the grunt through her teeth, the low shout from the back of her throat: a rutting bull, a tortured cow. Perhaps to Vipada’s other lovers this is arousing—the abandon, the unfiltered noise—but Suzhen decides that she’s not going to sleep with the actor again. Not that this time was a premeditated act or even something Suzhen was hoping for; Vipada invited her home for a drink, they kissed, and why not. Why not, Suzhen suspects, is a good reason to try a new cocktail or culinary novelty, but not necessarily sex with someone to whom she feels no real attraction.

Suzhen disentangles herself from between Vipada’s legs, wiping her mouth. Her jaw aches. At least Vipada tastes pleasant, clean. She tries not to think how much she would rather be in Taheen’s arms, enjoying the warmth of their palm on her jaw, the weight of their hand on her belly. Those hard lines of their muscles bunching and flexing against her skin.

The actor looks up at her through half-lidded eyes, her breathing harsh, her mouth parted. “That was very nice.”

“Thank you.” There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say.

“I’ve got interesting virtuality programs we could share. Or you could let me return the favor manually,” Vipada drawls, in a tone that makes it clear she has no such intention.

Not that Suzhen wants her to. Somewhere between foreplay and Vipada fingering her perfunctorily she’s been drained of all desire, the act has turned mechanical. “No, it’s fine.”

Vipada’s bathroom is a study in opulence, the ceiling panels done in clusters of pomegranates, the marble floor venting essential oils in low, perfumed clouds. Suzhen stands in front of a mirror and turns on a cool shower. She cups the water in her hands, watches it drip down between her breasts, and slowly touches herself. But her imagination comes up short in supplying her with an ideal lover, and she’s not in the place or time to virtualize. She gets clean. In the corner there is an immense metal apple that mixes body oils for her; she chooses orange and port wine.

“You smell so pretty,” Vipada says when she emerges. The actor is still in bed, nestled in ermines. Even her bedsheets, like all her furniture, seem selected to enhance her. The white and the red to compliment the deep honey of her skin. “Anything catching your fancy in the liquor cabinet? Help yourself.”

It is easy, Suzhen supposes, for Vipada to be magnanimous with things that cost her no effort to dispense: liquor, toiletries, money. Not sexual reciprocation. Perhaps it is a matter of occupationally induced narcissism. Someone who takes on the robes of divinity, the mantles of warlords and monarchs onstage, and so accustomed to rapt attention—Vipada’s body is an object of worship. And a deity who receives tribute does not return it in kind; gods take, not give. Suzhen thinks inevitably of Samsara as she asks the drone to make her a drink. Even Vipada’s domestic unit is a cut above, its veneer nacreous, its face charmingly made. It curtsies.

“So how is your work?”

Suzhen swirls her glass of cream-topped, liquor-thickened coffee. “I’m thinking of quitting.” This comes out before she can stop herself. Vipada is the last person in whom she would confide. The thought is that much at the forefront, coiled to spring free.

Vipada sits upright. “But why?”

It astounds her, to be asked such a question. In a tone of such surprise. Surely the potential burnout—and the rates are high at the Bureau, save for careerists like Nattharat who are unburdened by conscience—must be obvious. Her mentor. His funeral. “A lot of us do.” She sips the coffee, inhaling deeply. Exquisite, as expected of anything Vipada owns. It galvanizes her to honesty. “The Bureau is a system. We’re functions. Drones would do the work I do just as well, more efficiently. There’s no reason for me to be there.”

“It’s humanitarian work, Suzhen. Having human faces is the point. How can a new arrival feel safe interacting with a drone?”

Safer by far than interacting with humans—the camp wardens, the Interior Defense officers. The face of Anatta punishment is human more than it is Samsara. She doesn’t say this. She doesn’t say, How fucking dare you when you don’t know anything. “That may be. I’m not doing anything meaningful and I’m exhausted.” Suzhen swallows another mouthful. So gorgeously made, so cold. How much simpler it is to enjoy a drink; how much simpler it would be to enjoy this as abstract discussion, one that has nothing to do with visceral experience and everything to do with intellectual experiments. “I’m exhausted.”

The domestic unit glides into the bedroom, bearing a bowl of sesame-dusted, sautéed jellyfish. It seems a heavy post-coital snack, especially when Vipada did none of the work, though Suzhen knows she’s being petty.

The actor purses her lips. “I’m not going to convince you to stay there if it makes you unhappy—I’m not your superior or any such thing—but potentiates you helped would say your work’s meaningful. Taheen told me a little and, how do I put this, I suspect not every caseworker is like you.”

Such absolute, shameless manipulation. Suzhen imagines putting on her clothes, walking out. That would not be so difficult. “It is a process,” she says slowly, “in which I no longer wish to participate.” Much like fucking Vipada.

She returns to the domestic unit, asks for a mooncake—she might as well take advantage while she still can, almost a gesture of defiance. The actor follows her into the parlor, half-wrapped in a mauve robe, arms crossed. “It’s not my business,” Vipada begins. “I don’t want to overstep anything.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” The mooncake is served, cut in thin slices. She samples one. Velvety filling—pandan custard and lotus seed, mixed just right—and hot enough to scald going down.

“And I didn’t mean to sour things between us.”

“The mooncake’s fantastic.” A connection request from Ovuha, which doesn’t seem like her. Nevertheless Suzhen appreciates the rescue. “I’ve got to take this call. It’s work. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

The link opens. Ovuha is home and her tracker reports nothing alarming: this is no exigency. Suzhen relaxes. Yes, Ovuha? How was Taheen’s?

It was fine. Would you tune into the news? Humor me. Channel ten.

Suzhen does. The feed flickers on, peripheral; channel ten is reserved for minor incidents, low on priority. It is reporting on an event barely hours old—Rachel Luo, a potentiate from Wyomere… providing therapeutic service…

The details fall away; they don’t matter. What matters—what does not recede—is the body on the floor of what might be someone’s apartment, an icy floor the color of snowdrift. Pieces of background detail: the hem of a curtain or upholstery, the leg of a chair or table. Pastel. Slowly being overwhelmed by the foreground.

Yellow hair on marble tiles, blood seeping between, saturating the ground like paint on canvas.

Chapter Seven

She’s on a call with the caseworker assigned to Rachel Luo. A senior agent, careerist like Nattharat, the sort that doesn’t burn out. Did he know Rachel Luo was signing up to provide therapeutic service? “It’s legal,” he says. “Potentiates finding a job isn’t something I was going to get in the way of. Listen, Rachel was troubled. He had too many dependents—the wife is a mess, the children are sick most of the time, none of them could learn or get certified for anything. How they weren’t separated and all the kids fostered is anyone’s guess. Agent Suzhen, I’m taking your call as a courtesy, but you’re interrogating me.”

Therapeutic service. The terminology of elision. “I appreciate that, yes—”

“I’ve got a lot of other inquiries to field. And I will need to inform Rachel’s family.” He grimaces. Sighs. “So if you don’t mind.”

He ends the call. Suzhen rubs her eyes as the feed fades, leaving her alone in her bedroom. Her mouth is sour and thick, her pulse hammering against the thin sheath of her larynx. A potentiate dying is not new. By definition their mortality rate is higher, their existence more prone to sudden accident. Suicide is not easy but possible, there being no guidance to prevent it. Murder likewise, when both perpetrator and victim are potentiates.

She thumbs the door open; Ovuha stands behind it, hand lifted halfway to knock. “How are you feeling, officer?”

Said in the calmest voice as if Suzhen is the wracked patient, Ovuha the detached caregiver. The balance between them inverts. Suzhen presses her lips together. “I’m fine. My colleague wasn’t too helpful.” She exhales through her teeth. “He said it was an accident. That Rachel Luo’s client didn’t mean to go that far.” A slip of the knife, a shock turned up too far, the therapy of controlled violence. Not always sexual, though it can be, an approved method for a citizen to vent destructive impulses on a human body. More satisfying, the effects more lasting, than anything virtual could ever be. Not all citizens need it, but enough do, and is it not productive to give potentiates a legal venue to work—

Her gorge surges, acute, acidic. The guidance is supposed to prevent this, stop it long before anything fatal can occur. It is almost prescient in its anticipation of human impulse.

“How well did you know him?” she says, for lack of any other conversation. Or a bid to right the balance, to leave Ovuha as stricken as she, as wounded.

“In passing. His children didn’t particularly like me—not their fault, I’m terrible around children—and his wife was wary of strangers.” Ovuha folds her hands over her belly. “Is it possible for me to go back to the Jasmine? There’s something I would like to retrieve.”

“I thought you’d already gotten—” Not Ovuha’s belongings, which have all burnt, but the bird gifted to her by Rachel Luo. “Hardly the most sensible idea.”

“I won’t disagree.”

Not even a protest. Suzhen motions at her vanity seat. “There’s no reason you should be on your feet. I’ll look into how accessible the Jasmine is, whether I can authenticate you.”

She watches Ovuha take in the bedroom and realizes, with leaden terror, that she has never let anyone into her bedroom for a long time; there was a reason she slept with Vipada at the actor’s place, and every tryst with Taheen happens at their gallery. Her room is too personal, too close. Ovuha’s presence is suddenly claustrophobic.

“What,” Ovuha says slowly, “does the therapeutic service entails?”

“You already know.”

“I can infer.” Ovuha turns in the seat, gaze passing over the small wardrobe and its neat arrangement of cosmetics: the pigments in their frosted jars, the shade adjusters in their steel palettes, the nacreous dermal overlays in their refrigerated compartment. “It must make a certain sense. Rachel tried to find other work before and never could.”

“It’s prescribed for citizens in calibration who need it, like any medicine. The rules for it are strict. Nobody wants anyone dead.”

“The imperative that informs every human choice needs to be curbed or given a safe outlet. I understand. And I’m sure those who provide this are honored. May I ask whether you’ve ever availed yourself of such a service?”

“No,” Suzhen snaps. “That’s a very personal question.”

“Yes. But I wondered. You’re flawlessly kind otherwise. Do you not resent me for taking up the space I do, for living off you, for gobbling up your time and strength like a leech? To you I’m not an intangible statistic which appeals to your charity. I am a physical body that takes and takes while giving nothing in return.”

“What are you trying to provoke me into?”

Ovuha stiffens. Her expression creases, as if a lapse of judgment is like a bad dream from which she must fight to wake up. “Nothing. Or I don’t know, or I can’t say. It’s childish and I have no right to behave so poorly. I expect many people are unfair to you, exactly because you’re a saint, and I shouldn’t be one more. And I think—” She shakes not her head but her entire upper body, the way an animal might, the way a hawk could. “It does not matter what I think.”

The charge between them of things unsaid and the weight of their histories, and Suzhen imagines blurting out, I was a potentiate once but the words curdle on her tongue. She wants. It would be a bridge. She shakes off the seafoam sheet in her lap and in a few strides she is standing over Ovuha. Leaning over, thinking that she wants, but what does she want precisely. A displacement of frustration and of course she has not failed to notice, from the beginning, Ovuha’s looks. The engineered symmetry, the artificed magnetism. A person designed from conception for beauty. It is the wrong thing to think, even to consider. What is between them must be a bureaucratic boundary, changeless and unyielding.

Ovuha is looking up at her, face in Suzhen’s shadow, and her expression is not the fear that Suzhen thought she’d see—the fear that finally her caseworker is not so virtuous, has given in to impulses as base as any camp warden’s. “You asked me what I want from my life here.” Ovuha has laid her hand on Suzhen’s arm, light as spider feet. “I’ve been curious as to what you want.”

It jars. She is caught out. “Out of life in general?”

“The tragedy of saints is that no one asks what can be done for them, only what they can do for others. I wish I could bring joy to your life, and I’d wish the same if we had met in a different time, a different place, and you’d never done anything for me at all.” Ovuha’s fingertips are rough against the thin skin of Suzhen’s wrist, moving in small, slow circles.

“What would you do then? In a different time, a different place.”

“Ask if you’d like to see or fly a hawk, help you put on gloves and set an amiable one on your wrist. Take you to a vineyard where the grapes are as big as my fist, and the wine comes in a hundred colors. Then I would discover you like neither hawks nor wine, and be entirely mortified.”

Her mouth twitches. “There are vineyards on Gurudah?”

“As long as we’re fantasizing, anything is available.” Ovuha lifts Suzhen’s wrist. “May I?”

It is a precipice. After this there will be no coming back. “Yes,” Suzhen whispers, already anticipating the regret, the labyrinth she’ll need to navigate just to achieve a semblance of ethics. To return to where they were just an hour ago, just yesterday.

Ovuha kisses her palm, gently, her mouth soft and hot. Twice. Teeth scrape against the pad of Suzhen’s thumb. It is chaste contact, tame. The frisson that pierces her is like the onset of a fever, painful, delirious. She wants; this does not suffice. Ovuha’s lips climb to her forearm, then the inside of her elbow. Suzhen thinks of Ovuha pressing her down, making conquest of her body, doing things to her that someone like Vipada can’t imagine in a thousand years. She pictures herself rising and falling beneath Ovuha’s sure hands.

“We are stopping here.” Suzhen swallows. Her throat is dry. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I don’t pursue or permit anything I don’t desire. My sense of ownership to my body is absolute.” Ovuha has not let go of her wrist, her lips close to the point of Suzhen’s pulse. “I almost wish you were less honorable, but then I wouldn’t be so attracted. This leaves us at a peculiar impasse, don’t you think.”

Suzhen pulls away. “It doesn’t. There is no impasse. There’s abuse of power on my part.” She opens the window. Fresh air on her skin; she breathes deeply. The evening scintillates with traffic vectors, noisy without the soundproof pane. I don’t even think of you that way would protest too much, evidently false. But there was no latent lust, just an unscrambling of the senses by crisis, by her own trauma. Stress misfires into something else. “I put you into this situation. I made you—”

Ovuha cants her head, hands steepled in her lap, the picture of control. “If you believe I possess agency, then it follows that I would exercise it. I wasn’t always powerless and my personhood wasn’t always in question. But I understand that I could make my consent explicit until I’m blue in the face and you would still believe it compromised.”

She has to transfer Ovuha. But to whom—not to anyone like Nattharat, and most at the Bureau are more Nattharat than they are anything else. The ones who aren’t have long quit, or are too new to sponsor a potentiate, too new to handle… this. The model potentiate. The one that should be easy to speed through probation, the case that should be absolutely simple. “The Jasmine is accessible to caseworkers. I sent a request. I can look around the rooftop for you.”

“I would prefer to be there. If that is all right.”

Tomorrow she will look for an agent, she will find someone she can trust. And treating Ovuha as a project that can be turned over, that is itself a denial of personhood, of Ovuha as a full adult being. But the alternative she cannot bear. Not that Suzhen will ever be disciplined, especially if Ovuha does not file a complaint; there is room to flex and exploit, for caseworkers as it is for camp wardens. A caseworker could even claim it as therapeutic. The potentiate as the least of the least, anything inflicted upon them given sanction.

“Fine,” Suzhen says. “We’ll be there and back quickly. Dress for the cold.”

On the ride Suzhen is silent, remote, keeping a physical as well as conversational distance. Sufficient space between them to fit three passengers. Ovuha does not push, she knows better, but she glances at Suzhen and finds the officer tense, mouth a thin line. Billboard reflections fall across her in shards, in fragments. In profile she is an ephemeral sculpture, carved from skull and shadow.

Ovuha thinks again of how much easier it would be, if they’d met elsewhere. She understands herself well enough, the impulses that drive her to want Suzhen, to have this woman for her own. Like anyone, she is not impervious to the appeal of a benefactor who gives and gives, and does not demand. What she does not understand is Suzhen’s character, how Suzhen can maintain this resolve. In a world where she must have been taught that such resolve—such empathy—is neither necessary nor socially encouraged. No peer of Suzhen’s would fault her for making use of Ovuha, for finding satiation in Ovuha’s body.

“Does it work?” Ovuha asks mildly. Picking up from where they left off. “The therapy.”

“Samsara has judged it the best answer. Since it was introduced in calibration routines, rate of attempted crime has dropped to near zero.” Suzhen’s tone is clipped. “By that metric, yes, it works.”

“What other metric exists?”

To this she receives no response: Suzhen has shut down, Ovuha has pushed too far. A misstep, but one Ovuha knows she’s been careening toward. She has been reckless with this woman, in more ways than one.

They land on the balcony of the Jasmine’s midsection. There is no security present. Repair drones crawl along the building’s façade, undoing years of disuse, sealing up the cracks and impact sites—usually from within—on the windows. The complex is ready for habitation. Residents haven’t been moved back, Ovuha expects, on account of human inefficiency. Someone has not approved a process, someone else has not signed for the relocation of potentiates. Disinterest or malice, the result is the same. The handling of potentiates is regulated by Samsara, as all else is, but day-to-day matters fall under human management. The only area of civilian life on Anatta where people decide other people’s fates.

Suzhen glances at the elevator. “We’ll have to use the stairs.”

The stairways are compressed, narrow, though cleaner than Ovuha has ever seen them. The drones have scraped and melted away a decade’s worth of filth and the corridor smells of solvents. Lights come on as they mount the steps and fade behind them, an antiseptic gleam that makes a ghost of everyone. Eight floors up, a long climb where the only sounds are the muted buzz of drones and their footsteps and their breathing. She watches the small of Suzhen’s back, starkly outlined; one of the most magnificent features on a human body, Ovuha has always thought, that point where the spine curves, sinuous. She used to fit her palm against a lover’s spine just so. The biochemist to whom Ovuha could show her face, one of the few. Briefly Ovuha wonders how she is doing now. Well, she hopes, being a civilian.

Suzhen’s breathing grows loud and hitched. She leans against the railing and gasps. “How are you not even breaking a sweat?”

“I used to take these stairs to keep my stamina. Would you let me head to the roof alone? I’ll be fast.”

“Go ahead.” Suzhen clutches at her side, heaving. “Not like I’m in any shape.”

The rest of the way is faster, though Ovuha paces herself. She does not want to reach the rooftop winded, adrenaline squandered on the climb. It is not that she expects danger, precisely. But she prepares.

She steps out. Before her the evening is oxblood, wintry. Anatta is a beautiful world, the dream of the progenitor planet given exquisite form. Even the lace of cirrus seems handspun, the climate grids like seed pearls sewn into the atmosphere’s gown. Samsara governs, but once it was built to serve and to ensure every sight is pleasing to the human eye.

Not much has changed on the roof. The drones have left the botanical efforts alone, and the stone garden remains as she last saw it. The cardinal sits in its cage, as blue as ever and as mechanical. Its head swings toward her, twitching. For a moment she waits, listening. Nothing to the naked eye, the naked ear.

Ovuha opens the cage. The cardinal twitters. It is untampered with; she tucks it into her pocket.

“About time you turned up.”

She catches the reflection in the birdcage’s bars, an image of an image. Physically she is alone. She turns.

The image is flat, projected onto a wall, oversaturated. The man is spare to the point of gaunt, more cybernetics than skin. Replacement jaw and replacement joints, all gleaming a muted gray, unmistakable in what they are. He by intention does not wear prosthesis that passes for flesh.

“You recognize me,” he says.

A tell. She must have shown—a flicker of the gaze, a twitch of the mouth. He was not always called Bhanu, not when he was lieutenant to the Warlord of the Mirror. But he has retained his face, his voice, his accent. He’s done nothing to hide who he was. It is a gesture, foolishness or boldness. Given that he has survived, likely the latter. “I’ve heard much about you,” Ovuha says. “If one is in need of work, or hard-pressed to obtain citizenship, it is Bhanu whom one must turn to.”

“You are not from Gurudah. Zero phenotype match, unless you were a designer baby. But Gurudah can’t afford that, can it? Splicing out a few defects, cleaning up inherited diseases, not conjuring up a perfect child off a foreign genetic base. You made a mistake, Ovuha Sui. If Ovuha is even the name you were born with.”

Is he the contact, then, the old Thorn’s accomplice and therefore hers. But she cannot ask, not even to confirm whether he sent the ribbon-fish intermediary. And if she is wrong, then she is standing on the brink. All will fall down and crumble in an instant. “This seems thin evidence on which to build a case that I’m not who I appear to be. I’ve come a long way to reach Anatta, the same as everyone else. We all do what we must to make this voyage. Much as you must have.”

Bhanu continues to study her. On his end she doesn’t doubt he sees more clearly than she does, a gaze that slices through and picks at information in the bend of her jaw, the angle of her cheekbones. The things that make up her dossier. “What you must indeed. With a face like that, I expect you were a favorite of the wardens.” His voice lowers, insinuating, his mouth lifting into a suggestive curve.

In provocation a person’s character may be learned; pushed to fight/freeze/flight, reactions become predictable—the parameters have been narrowed down to a trinary. She returns his smile, returns his gaze. “You are right, I was a favorite to some because I could barter my skills. The value of my face you overestimate, and I am not wise to the crude matter of which you speak.”

“Who,” he says, “are you?”

He must know and this is an act. Or he may not know, and is acting in genuine hostility. “I’m an asylum seeker in whom you’ve decided to take an interest for reasons I cannot discern. Was it because I turned down your offer of protection?”

He cocks his head, avian, and leans forward. She imagines him with a long reptilian neck, a set of beaks glittering like frost. “I’m interested in what you will do. In five minutes, this building will collapse. The detonation starts from the top, this ought to give you plenty of time.”

The image fizzes out. He is not staying to watch her reaction, at least not anywhere she can see. It may be a bluff to measure Ovuha, how gullible she is, how she assesses risk. She lacks the sensors necessary to verify his threat.

She starts moving, calculating the vertical distance, the velocity. It is possible, with minutes to spare if she was on her own. She darts past the defunct elevators into the stairway and looks down the first set of steps. Too slow.

Ovuha vaults over. Anywhere else, safety features would have prevented it. She falls down the next four floors and catches herself on a banister. Her muscles pull taut, a radiance of agony, and she levers herself up. She is breathing harder than she would like, face to face with a startled Suzhen. “Officer, we’ve got to get out now.”

Suzhen looks at her, mouth tight, but does not ask. Willing to humor a potentiate seized by spontaneous panic, perhaps, in the grip of some flashback—fleeing Gurudah, evacuating a ship on the verge of expiring. Ovuha looks down: three minutes and forty seconds left. She doesn’t care to chance it.

She grabs Suzhen and slings the officer over her shoulder. “What—”

“No time.” Ovuha runs, leaps.

The impact is harder, Suzhen’s weight unbalancing her, and she nearly lands face-first on the stairwell. She does not. From above there is a keening of architecture under stress, the scrape of blast doors. Some would drop, others would stutter halfway. Ovuha keeps running: she has no reason to trust the Jasmine’s emergency measures.

They clear the stairway. One last dash as the rooftop crumbles, a hail of façade and building-bones.

In the car, sheltered, their bodies nest in one another’s. Their sweat, their panting, the roar of blood like post-coitus. Ovuha laughs, hoarse and abortive. She presses her head to the glass and watches the spider flowers fall, the spotted ferns, the shredded leaves. Like ashes they are buoyant, resistant to gravity the way human bodies are not. They will drift a long time and will not burst open on the ground.

Chapter Eight

This particular labyrinth of streets, half the world across. This is not where Suzhen belongs; this is not where she wanted to visit again. The jungle city Himmapan. The buildings are broad and photosynthetic, rough brown, bright jade. Floors sprawl like massive boughs, mantled in silver moss. The beauty of Himmapan is in the canopies, the proximity to the sky, the ophidian rooftops where human-faced birds roost. But it is the ground that Suzhen seeks, the footpaths like hard mulch, the shadows like green tar. The sun is far from here.

She passes other pedestrians. Every last one a citizen, luminous and full of purpose. Himmapan has almost no potentiate population. A child sits on an overhead window, feet swinging, cupped safely within the blunt talons of a domestic drone. Safer still within the hand of their guidance. Born citizens get that installed early, toddler years, shorn of privacy before they can speak. It is not without advantages. Down here the child may play and run as they please in perfect security.

Bhanu. The name broke off in Ovuha’s mouth, staccato. You know of him?

He’s a ghost we whisper about at the Bureau. A gossip item. Potentiates need a saint to pray to.

Further away from sunlight still, from the laughing child. The shadows are nearly solid, she can almost grasp them in her hands and coil them around her knuckles. All those years ago, after her mother’s death, this is where she came. She entered a potentiate, emerged a citizen. The site of her rebirth, the site of her remaking. She looks at the unmarked door, crooked, black save for the glints of colorful, polished glass. They are sharper than they look: she knows this from experience, the memory of needlepoint blood on fingertips. But she doesn’t need to touch the door—it parts for her. She steps in, breathing dust. The door shuts and then she is in the dark, her only point of reference a dim illumination ahead and a low, electronic susurrus.

The escalator down is as long as katabasis, as ponderous. She hears gurgling water, the exhalations of fish and abyssal creatures. The light is diffuse, as of heat and sun enfeebled by relentless chill. Bhanu told her that he originally wanted to make this place a memory of the red world and the palace of the Mirror, those infinite corridors and their countless doors. In the end it would have risked too much, he said.

She touches bottom. There is flat ground, and no more escalator.

The way ahead is cavernous, ceiling and walls glistening. Ossified eyes gaze down at her, track her movement, clicking as they rotate in their sockets.

Music, slow and seismic. A packed dance floor, ground fog up to Suzhen’s waist, made of perfume and cigarette stink. Figures gyrate, slashed by harsh light, jostling each other and pushing toward center stage. She flinches and avoids as best she can the slightest contact. Around her desultory conversation seethes in different languages, a multitude of patois.

The bar is a crescent, circumscribed by high jagged stools like upholstered stalagmites. There is no one behind the bar, only a constellation of glasses. Each is delicately blown and gorgeous and fractured, a crack in the stem, a fragment chipped off the rim. She pushes herself onto a seat and lays her hands flat on the countertop. It is immaculate, without the stains of glasses and cups, without the stickiness of spilled drink. This is not because it is kept clean: it is because the bar has never been used at all. “Bhanu,” she says.

The music changes and accelerates into something with teeth, hurting her eardrums. The light changes. If she turns around, she’ll see clearly that the dancers are not human but fleshy, faceless mannequins with the bloated, wriggling skin of corpses giving nest to maggots. She does not turn around.

Someone joins her, taking up the seat adjacent. Across the bar two specters resolve from the ground fog and the jangled illumination: a copy of her, a copy of him.

“Thank you for making time for me.”

“I always make time for you.”

She glances at him and discovers he didn’t send a mannequin. It is him, in the flesh. The years have passed Bhanu by without bruising or creasing him. The ageless metal parts, the tight skin. He does not look young, but he didn’t look young when she and her mother arrived. Her mother aged and weakened while Bhanu didn’t. For this she will always resent him.

Across the bar their phantoms sip drinks and talk, but differently. Weather, politics, the shape of Himmapan. Where is the newest gallery, does he have recommendations, what does he think of that arena sport. This will be what her guidance witnesses and records, its senses fooled by the convolution of interference and duplicates and decoy signals. Bhanu has only ever deployed it twice before, once for her mother speaking with him, another time for Suzhen speaking with Xinfei. To give mother and child a moment, tremulous, of total privacy. A veil Samsara may not penetrate, is not even aware exists.

“Ovuha Sui,” Suzhen says.

“Is not who she says she is.”

Her fist closes. “What of it?” Neither is she, neither is Bhanu.

“I expect she’s a little like us. She was somebody. And that makes her fraught. You’d do well to make her someone else’s problem.”

She remembers how easily Ovuha carried her, the tremendous strength. The way Ovuha handled the situation like someone with combat experience. “I was in that building.”

“Not within blast radius, not in a spot at risk of structural integrity. I’d never harm you. My duty to my lord didn’t end when she fell. It is forever, or at least until you die of old age.” His simulacrum makes a joke and laughs, too loudly. “But you’re making this duty unnecessarily difficult.”

“She came into my care. I’d prefer you don’t try to kill her.” Arson, explosives. What next.

He draws a wine flute down from overhead, as simply as picking a ripe fruit. He turns it in his hand. There is nothing to pour into it, though she expects Bhanu can produce liquor from beneath the counter, or through sleight of hand. “She poses a unique risk to you. I don’t need to belabor why. My lord bade me ensure you not only survive but thrive. This woman, whoever she was, gets in the way of that.”

“Tell me what you think she used to be.”

“It would be useful to find out, but it would be more expedient to simply do away with her. A foot soldier, a pilot, an officer. Who knows. She might have deserted or her lord was vanquished. Coward, either way.”

This is the one concession, the one point for which she cannot hate Bhanu. His desire was to stay to the end, at the Mirror’s side. You would die for me, the warlord told him while Suzhen eavesdropped. Yes, my lord, he most likely said. Good. Now I command you to live for me. That will be harder, I think. But I trust in your resilience.

Born to serve, dedicated wholly to it, and his lord turned him away. He would have done anything for the Mirror and this, as she said, was the hardest.

“I’ve never thought of her as my parent.”

Bhanu stares at her, silent.

“To me, as to you, she was the lord.” Of that red world, of all that Suzhen knew. Whether she saw the Mirror unmasked, whether the Mirror was tender to her, all that was beside the point. “If I have Ovuha transferred to another agent, would you leave her be?”

“I will refrain from having her killed.”

It is a compromise. It is not one she will accept. “Not good enough. If so, I’ll keep her with me until her six months are out, and your next attempt is going to either kill me too or maim me for life.”

Bhanu puts the wine flute down, spinning it on the countertop. It rolls, making brittle harmonics. “Even if I don’t do anything, keeping her with you will either kill or maim you regardless because of the trouble she attracts. She is at least willing to put you out of harm’s way, so she may not be entirely honorless.”

What is honor, Suzhen thinks, amazed that he still talks of this intangible philosophy. But she’s achieved her preferred result; she may not be entirely honorless is a concession. Bhanu will leave Ovuha alone, for now. “She’s a person of function. And very human, for all that.”

“Empathy isn’t a virtue you can afford. Even this world doesn’t teach this thing as a virtue.” Another clink. The glass whirls, dangerously close to the edge. “You would think they would. Empathy sounds like it should be the natural enemy of violence.”

“It isn’t.” One can have empathy for select human beings and regard the rest as parasites. It is the simplest compartmentalization in the universe, this dividing and sub-dividing of other people, the way Anatta’s system already does for them. Suzhen expects Nattharat holds empathy for her children, her husband.

Bhanu doesn’t comment. “Are you in need of anything?”

She is in need of peace and certainty, but those are not commodities he can secure. He is powerful enough to acquire citizenship, the most expensive luxury there is, but he cannot purchase or bargain for contentment. “I’m fine. Looking into a career change, and I can handle that myself.” A few application forms sent and by the time Ovuha has completed her probation, Suzhen will have a new post waiting that suits her inclinations and abilities. Samsara provides.

“Good. Get away from this. I’ve never thought,” he adds, “that you resembled the lord in any way. Power is cultivated, not inherited.” He leans forward and the specters dissipate, closing off a conversation about fusion food.

It is half an insult. Suzhen was never trained to succeed the warlord. She still doesn’t know why she was conceived, other than as a whim, the Mirror’s whim to create a family. And love, perhaps there was that, making even warlords into fools.

Suzhen did not ask her mother whether love was a factor, a variable in the red world’s equation.

The domain of the Mirror was called Vaisravana. A heartbreaking name, she used to think.

Tatters of gauze, white, across Ovuha: lateral to her torso, scattered over her thighs and ankles like discarded paper, shriveled lilies. She lies as an injured body, the bed slanted so that her head points lower than her feet. She is naked. Atam stands to the side and gazes, avid, almost trembling.

“You’d have beautiful feet,” the painter, Zurun, says. “If only you took better care of them.”

From her vantage point she is unable to see em. Her line of sight is constricted, upside down. What she sees: Atam’s knees, the bottom line of the mezzanine waterfall, a fraction of the window. “Does a corpse need beautiful feet?”

“A corpse needs beautiful everything if it is to be painted.” Zurun clicks eir tongue, a birdlike noise. “Hold on for a little longer and shush.”

Ovuha holds. She watches the water, the unsteady stance of Atam. Zurun’s interest has remained strictly aesthetic, almost clinical. The painter is intrigued by the arches of feet, the edge of cheeks, the exquisiteness of the human skeleton. A fetish for bones. Atam’s fascination is more composite, flesh as well as what scaffolds it, and xie hides that poorly. It amuses Ovuha to be the body on display, objectified twice over. To be witnessed entirely for her stylistic value. She ought to feel outrage.

“All right.” Zurun rises with a rustle of taffeta and articulated dress-joints. Ey tosses eir hair away from the small electrum antlers that decorate eir brow. “You can get up.”

Ovuha stands, too quickly. She waits for the blood in her head to pour down, resettle. The gauze falls away, new-old skin quickly shed. Zurun’s drone collects it. Atam hovers, xer eyes carefully on Ovuha’s face, though she’s caught them veering downward before. “Is there anything else?” Ovuha asks.

Zurun has stepped away from eir canvas. Ey circles it, head bent to the portrait of Ovuha-as-corpse. “Are you allergic to feathers?”

“Not at all.”

“Birdcage,” Zurun muses. “The question is, what kind of bird? What do you think, Atam?”

Xer brow furrows. “A bird of prey?”

“Not very colorful by nature, but maybe it’s the impression that matters. Let me see what I’ve got.” Zurun doesn’t use particulate projection or virtual superimposition. Eir props are real, tangible objects. Ey glides away to eir storeroom, expression turned inward.

Ovuha glances at the waterfall that cascades endlessly from the mezzanine, a pennant of perfect light. Stray droplets have caught in her lashes. “Is ey supposed to poach from Taheen?” Who is out in Zurun’s parlor, snarling at some industry contact, last she saw of them.

Atam twitches, inhaling sharply. “They share models sometimes. Taheen is something of a scout. People they’ve picked out as beautiful and interesting tend to go on to have glamorous careers.”

“What about you?” Ovuha remains bare; she considers arranging herself to best take advantage of shadow and water, the better to entice Atam’s gaze.

“I like being where I am. Steady work, pays well.” A ripple of shoulders. “The industry is full of vipers. Everything is competition, anyone a step above is someone you kiss up today and ruin tomorrow. The slightest disagreement turns into epic feuds. Everyone is incredibly neurotic, they go for five behavior calibrations a month. Taheen is more even-keeled than most and I wouldn’t want to get closer to them than employer and employee.”

“I heard all that,” Zurun says, emerging from eir storage with arms full of feathers. Narrow ones, broad ones, ones with eyes. “Atam isn’t wrong, of course. What do you think? Do you want a career?”

Ovuha cants her head, noncommittal. “I’m more of Atam’s party than anything.”

Zurun’s eyes glaze over as ey searches for anatomical diagrams of birds, selecting references from eir datasphere. Then ey draws on Ovuha with thin, gray ink. Lines of hollow bones, lines of aerodynamics. “I’m not going to affix wings to you,” the painter is saying, “that would be so kitschy. Kinnaree. Hah. Have you ever been to Himmapan?”

Ovuha says no, and lets the painter glue plumage to her body. Feather by feather, coverts and filoplumes. In a moment the suggestion takes shape. Not a kinnaree but wings flaring across her stomach, a lone talon extending from her hip, an avian eye peering from between her breasts. She is a human cage through which a falcon struggles, piecemeal, to burst out and win its freedom.

“Taheen is going to steal this idea when they see it,” Atam murmurs.

The painter waves eir hand. “Let them. As long as they pay my licensing fee. Artistic symbiosis is a lovely, profitable thing.”

Atam looks from Zurun to Ovuha, xer glance conspiratorial. “Doesn’t Ovuha get a small cut? I usually do.”

The painter chortles. “Do you see, being of Atam’s party has its perks. Dry detail and accounting, the things that keep the world on its axis. Yes, she gets a cut. Ovuha, let’s try several poses. I’ll have to chew on the image for a day or two. We’re going to go for saturated colors in the backdrop, I think. Impressionistic maybe.”

Ovuha doesn’t relish the thought of putting on all these props again tomorrow or the day after, but it is as Atam says: the pay is good, the work far from onerous. These are the building blocks, a path toward blending in. She stands with arms spread; she sits curled, fetal, as if to keep the falcon in; she stands on the edge of the mezzanine, limned by water and on the verge of plummet. A variety for Zurun to contrast and record. Ovuha wonders how quickly her face will detach from the images, the design. These portraits are not about the subject but the painter.

They are done. She is given privacy to dress, and in the bathroom—decorated in mermaid shadows and albatross wings—she consults the scrap of code that she finally found by viewing the replicant cardinal through a filter of the neurotoxin map. She closes her eyes, visualizing as she peels the feathers from skin, adhesive coming off in gray rinds. The cardinal’s cipher is unique in that only she and her predecessor know it, told in non-sequitur poetry, using allusions she would recognize but which would be meaningless to anyone else. From it she extracts names. Just four. Two she can recognize, one of them a halfway house warden, the other an Interior Defense captain she occasionally sees on broadcasts. It’s an incomplete list and she’ll need to find more, but all things considered it is adequate. Each name is an investment the old Warlord of the Thorn made, a web of enormous resources to prepare for Ovuha’s arrival on Anatta. Years of conditioning, of altering thought and behavior, of concealing minds inside minds.

Atam visibly relaxes to see her dressed again as she emerges into the parlor. Taheen has finished their acrimonious call with their hapless contact, takes one look at Ovuha and says, “The two of you, are you sleeping together?”

“Taheen,” Atam gasps.

“It’s just that you make it terribly obvious, Atam. Either you’re together or you’d very much like to be.” The couturier turns to Ovuha. “Sorry to be indelicate, but I like to keep ahead of these things among my models. It happens.”

Ovuha adjusts the lapels of her fresh, crisp jacket. “Very mindful of you. If it is true, what would you like to do about it?”

They chuckle over Atam’s spluttering. “Nothing. Just do let me know if it goes south, please, so I can separate you. These things can sour a working environment, the two of you being so professionally involved, and I’m your primary employer.”

“I will keep it in mind.”

They leave Taheen to discuss artistic symbiosis and licensing agreements with Zurun. In the elevator—a long way up to the nearest train station, Zurun’s studio being in a lower stratum—Atam exclaims, “I can’t believe Taheen said that. I’d never even seen you naked until today and it’s in a professional context!”

“It did seem unnecessary,” Ovuha says, “though admittedly they have a point.” Pettily expressed, even so, tactless—a little spiteful. She doesn’t think it is because Taheen has an opinion one way or another where Atam finds xer carnal delights. More likely it is to do with Ovuha and Ovuha’s presence in Suzhen’s life. The glimmer of feeling she’s witnessed when Taheen speaks of Suzhen. “Would you have preferred that I deny it?”

“No. Well. Of course not. But it’s not as though we’re… I mean, I hired you. It’s not as though I earned you by wooing and seducing.”

Ovuha leans against the wall. Most elevators in this city are like pieces of a beehive, hexagons in dark quartz and lava stone. “Am I something to be earned?”

Xie flushes. “That’s not what I meant, that you’re a commodity, an object. But it’s different. You know it is. I didn’t fairly engage your interest, I didn’t convince you I was a good prospect in bed. If our places were switched at the studio, me the one modeling nude and you the one clothed, you wouldn’t have paid me any attention.”

For a fleeting instant, she visualizes what that would be like, if Suzhen had been the one stripped, plumage glued onto her a little at a time. “You underestimate your own charms. There’s an inviting softness to you, you’re like an instrument that begs to be played.”

“It’s so unfair,” Atam says. “You’re superhumanly comfortable in your skin and you’re stunning. And you’re so good at flattery. Debonair, that’s the adjective for you.”

She thinks back to the surgery. Her face is a work of art, but like Zurun’s portraits, it is a demonstration of technique and skill; the subject—the canvas—is secondary. “I suppose so.” She smiles then. “We should make another appointment. I would arrange it between the two of us, but I expect that would offend the people in charge of this. It must be a specialized job, matchmaking us.”

“Matchmaking!” Xie tosses xer pastel hair, locks of blue and white and pink flying. “Oh, why not, we can think of it that way. You’re far too romantic. But I’ve never met or talked to any of them, either, though they aren’t from the Selection Bureau—I don’t think? I used to think this was overseen by Samsara, but…”

The elevator stops. They have reached the streets. “Let me see if I can woo you in turn,” Ovuha says. She might glean something about the connection, might weave it into what she’s learned of Bhanu. “Is there a café or bistro nearby that you like?”

Xie raises an eyebrow, but does not look displeased. “Sure. There’s a place.”

It has just rained; every surface refracts. Under this glaze everything is of surpassing beauty, newly made. The broad avenues, the overhead thoroughfares, the gleaming shells of lifts. Outside the camps and the selection waiting rooms, Anatta is never busy or crowded—footpaths are never congested, commercial districts and hospitals are never too full. The world housed so many more once, Ovuha knows; today’s population is only a fraction of a fraction. Humanity quartered and then quartered again—down to what proportion is a fact lost to time, or a figure Samsara has chosen not to preserve. Ovuha thinks about the AI often, cannot avoid doing so.

Beside her, Atam has stopped walking, has gone inert altogether, as if gripped by premonition. “Oh,” xie breathes.

“Yes?”

“Samsara. Samsara’s descending. We get a whole day—”

And it is as though the rain was mandated to set the stage. The light turns gold, liquid, pouring down the length of street. In the sky, Samsara. It looms giant, making a crown jewel of the sun, a mantle of the fibrous clouds, a grid-brocade of the horizon. This is not the aspect of war shown to prisoners and defeated armies, the one with incandescent briars. This one is soft, with gentle eyes and a mouth of endless magnanimity. The aspect of gift.

A multitude of Samsara proxies, then, these more human-sized—though still tall, each body well over two meters. They drop down from the air, emerge from between buildings, rise from the citrine tide. Countless seeds of faith blooming to sudden divine flowers. Each proxy separates from the mass, citizen-seeking. A face like sweet dreams and childhood memories, a voice lifted in song.

One approaches, holding its gleam-gloved hands out to Atam. Xie goes without looking back.

Chapter Nine

Suzhen comes home to the aromas of cooking, of domesticity. This is what her apartment has become, to return and be greeted and welcomed and fed, a beautiful stranger and the illusion of a perfect life. She smells garlic and scallions; she smells the temptation of claiming this life as her own.

Ovuha does not look up from her work, her hands gloved in flour, moving and kneading. “Did you have a good trip out of the city?”

“I went to wage battle for your soul.” She says this dryly.

“Thank you.” A faint smile. “I understand hyperbole. But you’ve been doing so much for me. And I understand battle.”

Suzhen studies those hands, though much is hidden by the white. She pictures those long fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Incongruity should not surprise her; after all, the Warlord of the Mirror stepped out of her armor and put a child on her lap, and might have even chopped vegetables. She can’t remember. “What kind of battles do you understand?” She meant to ask what is for dinner, but there it is instead.

“The same ones everyone else does. The wear and tear of life. Paperwork. Standing in line. Ah. I must wash my hands.”

She stands there and thinks of soaping up her hands, scraping off the dough from beneath Ovuha’s nails. Their fingers under the water together. It is the most mundane thing imaginable, the most absurdly intimate. She would not do that with Vipada. How ludicrous she is being, to want not even Ovuha’s mouth but this chaste gesture. Maybe this was the secret, the fulcrum on which her conception turned, a warlord’s wish for closeness and a place to come home to. Banal. Human.

“It’s occurred to me,” Ovuha says, wiping her hands dry, “that you don’t say much about yourself, or even at all.”

“I don’t.”

“I barely have any idea what you like to eat.”

“All your cooking is good.”

“Or what you like to wear, or what you enjoy doing as a hobby.”

“I have no hobby to speak of. Taheen found you a second patron, I heard.”

Ovuha bends her head, reaching up as if to touch her hair. It has grown quickly, grazing her shoulders. In the camps hair is shorn until it sits close to the skull, stubbly. “A painter named Zurun. I have no complaint—ey’s already paid me for the first session, even. I owe Taheen no small amount. They’re an exemplary person, despite their pretense to the contrary.”

An angle from which Suzhen can push the conversation away from herself. “You aren’t wrong. They’re more compassionate than they let on, and usually better to me than I deserve.”

“And so? Is that a thing we measure, the quality of deserving? You have been more than good to me; do I not deserve your kindness?”

“That isn’t the same.” Suzhen checks, and there have indeed been a couple transfers to Ovuha’s account. She authenticates, freeing the sum up for Ovuha to spend. She does this automatically, without thinking. There it is, the reminder of bureaucracy and of what she is; so much for the fantasy. “At any rate it’s good your second patron is decent.” She falters, alarmed at her puckered vocabulary. This is good, that is good. There is no reason for her to be this tense and this fraught. She has made her decision and declared it before Bhanu, and that is almost as absolute as declaring her intention before a god. “Let’s be fair. You haven’t talked about yourself all that much.”

“I’d have thought I did that too much as it is, to the point of narcissism. What else have I talked about?” She does touch her hair now, finger-combing it, as if not entirely sure of its texture or length. Like everything about her it is well-made, fine and straight. “Kindness catches me by surprise. Yours, Taheen’s. Would you like dinner now or would you rather freshen up first?”

Suzhen discovers that she would, indeed, rather freshen up first. A domestic drone may cook but it will not ask that, anticipate that she is tired and grimy from three hours of travel. It could be coded to acknowledge those things, given a simulacrum of personality, but she’s never bothered; it seems pathetic to want that of a machine, something only lonely people would do. Only she has become one of those people, and though Samsara’s rules say that all ways of life—solitaire or pair or multitudinous—are equally valid, it is difficult not to feel that she has failed. It isn’t even that she needs to worry about frailty in old age. The state will take care of her, she’ll always have a domestic drone with medical modules appended to it, a warm caring voice if she opts for that. Even her mother’s voice, should she require. All her days will be comfortable. She can live to a hundred eighty, two hundred. The reward of embracing Samsara. Partnership was socially required once, a convention for survival. Not any longer.

Mid-shower, Vipada calls. Suzhen keeps the visual off on her end. “Yes,” she says. Her head is craned far back for the cilia to massage and lather her scalp. Her vision is one half bathroom ceiling, one half Vipada lounging in her sofa.

“I’m co-hosting a wedding. Pretty traditional affair. Two spouses. Well, they’re both married already, so this will be their second simultaneous marriage. I picked the caterer. The food’s to die for, I promise.”

“I don’t think I know either of the betrothed. Or any of the guests.”

“Well, you don’t. But—”

“You need warm bodies to fill the seats.” Suzhen shuts her eyes, blotting out the ceiling, but Vipada’s face remains projected across her datasphere. The cilia have washed off shampoo, are reaching for the conditioner. Coconut, its cloying sweetness tempered with grapefruit. “I’m not that good a choice, being outside your social circles, your industry even.”

“You can bring a plus one.” Bargaining. “Plus two. Both the food and the drinks will be fantastic. We’re holding it at a vineyard out in the Tianzi Peninsula.”

Access to which is not easy to come by, Suzhen will grant that. A vineyard. “I’ll let you know. Is tomorrow in time for the guest list?”

“Tomorrow is fine.” Vipada beams and blows her a kiss. “I owe you one. Wear something Taheen made, if you do come?”

Dictatorial on dress code, even for a favor, intent on the event looking picturesque—everyone must exhibit their best. Suzhen towels off. She puts on a plain, fluffy robe. For the first week of sharing her space with Ovuha, she never appeared in the kitchen or living room less than fully dressed, but she’s grown lax.

Today Ovuha has deep-fried puffs filled with shredded white radish and honeyed pork, crispy and delicately layered. Miraculously it is not even slightly greasy. She doubts Vipada’s catering will match it.

“There’s something I saw today,” Ovuha is saying. “Could I ask you about it?”

“Go on.”

“Samsara descended.”

Her pulse jabs, unreasonably. “It happens now and again. A kind of holiday.” Holy day. “A piece of Samsara spends the day with you, taking care of you.” Stronger than any drugs, more potent than any orgasm, the endocrine system held in thrall.

Ovuha sweeps up crumbs of pastry into a spoon and licks them clean, a flash of tongue. It is oddly childlike, to relish the crumbs so much, the unhealthy part of a meal. “What is that like?”

“For a day, you forget that you’ve ever been alone.” Or that there is a past, or that there is a future; the mind becomes capable only of warmth and ecstasy and the present. The worst is the wound left behind when Samsara is gone, the return of autonoetic consciousness, the knowledge that sublimity has passed. “It can be transcendent. I’ve had the privilege once.” An experience she would die to repeat, and die to avoid. Too much of herself subsumed, too much given. It is not an act of receiving a benediction but an act of yielding will and identity to Samsara far more deeply than any calibrating session.

The finest twitch of the mouth. “It sounds very special, a blessing to aspire to, one day. No wonder my coworker abandoned me, my company’s hardly any competition. Does this happen much?”

Suzhen closes her chopsticks over the last pastry. It is an art in itself to pick one up without destroying the puff halfway to the mouth. “Not that often, twice a year, maybe. It’s not regular and the location’s almost random.” What is rare and unpredictable is precious. Manufactured scarcity, like so much else. When the reward is infrequent and arbitrary, humans—like rats—pull the lever until their fingers wear down to nubs. “I’m going to ask you something. Were you ever in combat roles, back on Gurudah?” She doesn’t soften the question, doesn’t work up to it. Simply she fires it, shutting off opportunity to escape, to prepare.

“Oh. That’s all? Yes, I was, of course. Out in the—” Ovuha splays her fingers, as though trying to approximate the shape of poverty. “Out in the colonies, everyone multi-tasks. Each according to their ability. We were protected, to be sure, but sometimes there was fighting. Gurudah wasn’t the richest place but we had more comforts than some, and there were raids on our stores.”

“You didn’t disclose that before.”

Ovuha sets her chopsticks down. “I didn’t think of it as important—rather like disclosing that I did odd jobs. But I see what you mean. Should I report myself?”

Suzhen does not, quite, take that at face value. It is a particular omission, and Ovuha would have known such a thing makes her military-adjacent. And Bhanu could still be right. “No need. I’ll see to that if it’s required. It was just a thought that came to me, and speaking of stray thoughts—how would you like to attend a party? It’s held at a vineyard.”

“You remember.” Ovuha leans forward a little, her expression caught between laughter and reservation. The province of the eternally cautious. “I’m sorry, do you even like vineyards? It was just something that came to mind at the time.”

“Vineyards are fine and this one is in Tianzi Peninsula, so it’s bound to be amazing. And I want the person who invited me to owe me a favor—I don’t like her very much. She’ll expect me to bring another Bureau agent, somebody staid, and I want to surprise her.”

Ovuha grins. It looks almost out of place on so composed a countenance, this wideness of the mouth, this show of the teeth, mischievous and delighted. It pares away years. “Is there anything else?”

“It’s a wedding. The guest list will mostly be artists, designers, actors and their hangers-on. Taheen will probably be there.” Suzhen catches a passing betta, cupping it in her palm. It wriggles, cool and dry on her skin. “I categorically dislike career creatives.” Taheen being the unique exception.

Ovuha is chuckling now, a low thrum. “I’ll look my best. I believe I know how to make creatives intrigued and envious of your arm decoration.”

“You are my guest, not a decoration,” Suzhen says, though she realizes that is precisely what she wants. To irritate Vipada by having someone on her arm who is exciting, unreachable. “It may even be good for your job prospects. Networking.”

“As long as I don’t let on my residency status.”

“I’ll vet potential patrons with Taheen.” She opens her hand, lets the betta swim away. It darts to rejoin a school vector. Like anything, its natural arc is to seek belonging. “You won’t have to pretend to like the other guests or even be that polite. Contempt might make them that much more interested.”

“You really don’t like artists. Categorically.”

“No.” Suzhen summons the drone. It wheels over and starts collecting the plates and cutlery. Left alone Ovuha might well take over that task, and Ovuha is too close to a domestic helper for Suzhen’s comfort as it is. “We should try to enjoy ourselves. Vipada assured me we’ll experience culinary rapture.”

Ovuha gives her a quick smile. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For finally talking about you. The things you like. The things you don’t. Those are a start.”

Ovuha’s hand brushes across Suzhen’s. Her nerves pull taut. Then relax. The small touches, the transience of what might have been. But that is all they are. That is all they could ever be.

The Tianzi Peninsula, out in the empty ruinscape, the wild parts of the earth that might one day be recouped and repopulated. But not yet. For now there are cities enough.

From above, a vision of absence, the ruins left as they were. Most structures have long fallen to decay but what remains seems to Suzhen artificial, the product of an obsessed imagination—too perfectly luminous to be carved by chance and nature. Pale ocean light suffuses; a lone corrugated tower stands, made of red iron and stark lines and tapered finials. Bell-shaped cages depend from its exterior like earrings, empty, their bars trembling in the wind. To the side, an anonymous coast where a line of rotted houses shudder and heave with the waves, their roofs gone to nests and spotted eggs, feathers emerging from cracked shell.

It is this emptiness that is prized, the appearance of virgin land dating back, a snapshot of geography in the process of restoration after humanity had fallen asleep. No wonder the betrothed couple would choose this as their matrimonial site, for the clean beginning it signifies. An expensive choice.

The vineyard is a floating isle that patrols above the peninsula in sedate, scenic circuits. When Suzhen was younger she thought it was a meteor, most of it lost to atmospheric entry, cut down to this one fragment adrift and held captive by Anatta’s sky. She would look at it and think of this as her second self, and as long as she could imagine she was kin to a piece of meteor it could—for a time—hold sadness at bay.

She glances at Ovuha, who has dressed in one of Taheen’s prototypes. A qipao of waterfall silk and fired chitin, azure on basalt. Plating over breasts and shoulders like thin armor, a white-gold mandible at each ear. On Taheen’s recommendation Suzhen lined Ovuha’s eyes in platinum and black, her mouth with the color of unoxygenated blood. The effect is severe, forbidding.

“This outfit is something else again.” Ovuha holds up her hands; what sheathes them—up to her elbows—are more gauntlets than gloves, jointed and dark. “For a Taheen Sahl design, though, it’s so plain I feel underdressed. What do you think?”

Ovuha’s Putonghua, already impeccable, has gained a mellifluous enunciation that she must have learned from Zurun and Taheen. The fine register of the highly educated, the well-off. “It’s very intimidating, very elegant. Perfect on you.”

“The insect motif is novel. I was concerned a moment that Taheen was going to suggest sticking a couple antennae on my forehead.”

Suzhen imagines that; snorts. “I’m sure they will miraculously look good on you regardless.”

“And you look wonderful, of course.”

“Of course?”

“I think you always look good,” Ovuha says. Her qipao rustles like dry paper. One of her knees touches Suzhen’s, but it is the merest contact. “Exceptionally wonderful, then, even more so than usual.”

How easy it would be to believe. She wonders at the rapid-moving parts of that mind, behind that incomparable face. It may simply be a survival tactic, it may simply be ingratiation. In the interview room new arrivals would promise her anything, offer her whatever she asks. No matter the amount of familiarity, it is impossible to discern the brushstrokes of someone else’s thoughts: that was one of her mother’s favorite proverbs.

They are early. Vipada is at the gate, resplendent—overdressed, Suzhen thinks uncharitably—in her gown of interlinked serpents, bronze and gold. “You brought a guest!” she says, bright, the perfect host. “Introductions, please.”

“Ovuha. I’m a friend of Suzhen’s. You must be Vipada, she’s told me about you.”

The actor quirks her mouth, turns on one of her lunar smiles: charming, secretive. “Anything good at all?”

“Oh,” Ovuha murmurs, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “she is very honest.”

Vipada bursts into laughter, throaty, a little scandalized. “You’re terrible for someone with so lovely a name. Have I met you before, by any chance?”

Ovuha links arms with Suzhen and somehow makes the gesture look insolent. “No, not at all. I am sure you are often told you’re memorable—if I’d met you before, I would have remembered it without question. Naturally I mean that in the best way possible.”

To this Vipada shakes her head, slighted but also entertained, in the way of someone encountering avant-garde art that she isn’t entirely sure she likes. “I must get to know you at all costs. But let’s introduce you to the couple, shall we?”

The betrothed are in bridal red—even their irises are rimmed in the color, wedding lenses—flanked by their extant spouses. A teenager stands to the side, sullen, none too happy with new guardians or however the parental arrangement falls legally and domestically. It is not easy, Suzhen supposes, for a child of this world. Used as they are to closed-circuit families, narrow and private. On Vaisravana most children were raised in creches, communal, everyone a parent. She was an exception, though she did attend classes with the others.

One of the betrothed thanks her for coming, adding, “I’m so sorry Vipada conscripted you. It’s her idea that we should have a massive reception, and she likes hosting so we had to let her. We hope you’ll have a half-decent time.”

“There’s nothing onerous,” Ovuha says, bowing slightly. “Romance exerts a glorious magnetism. Even if we’re strangers, I’m happy for you. Thank you for letting us share in your day.”

The couple looks at each other and laughs, blushing. Ovuha seems to have been the first to congratulate them so earnestly, out of the strangers Vipada invited. The reception proper is twenty-five minutes away; they are free, evidently, to tour the vineyard until then.

“You’re incapable of culture shock,” she says as they veer away from the square demarcated for festivities.

“It’s more that wealthy people are the same everywhere. People in love as well. But they look radiant, I’m glad for them.”

“Next you’ll say you admire their youth and that it makes you wistful.”

“No such thing. I don’t miss my youth.” Ovuha flicks her head; the mandibles ring as they cut through the air. “When I was young, I was quite stupid. Too hungry, too grasping.”

They reach one of the exhibits; a few other guests have come to look as well, pairs or groups in polynomial suits, terraced bodices, termite waistlines. Spread out enough that everyone can claim their pocket of quiet. The trellises stand tall overhead, jeweled with grapes in glass-green and beetle-blue, roofed with wide punctuational leaves. Looking up it is difficult not to be snared, enchanted. They are only fruits, a mesh of plant organs and neural pathways, without complication or mystery. But perfect in what they are, effortless, offering themselves up to the world.

There are tasters under trellises, little obelisks that dispense wine and grape juice made from different strains. Some saccharine, some nearly bitter. There are cultivars that taste faintly of pandan, citrus, sake. They go from obelisk to obelisk, their mouths turning sticky. Suzhen keeps her sampling of the wine slight and notices that Ovuha does the same. Even so her feet turn a little lighter and the weight of her body recedes.

“I’ve got this ridiculous urge,” Ovuha says, “to roll in the soil and let it lodge under my fingernails, let the grass stain this gorgeous qipao. Crushed grapes in my hair. It must be something primate. Imagine.”

“Yes.” They are standing beneath ruddy vines and grapes bred to golden luster. She twists off a single grape and rolls it on her palm; it is large, nearly the size of a plum, cool to the touch and unblemished. “The bounty of Anatta.” She bites, careful, as if the fruit bristles with thorns. Even so it splits and yields at once, flesh and juice in her mouth. A note of alcohol under what tastes like caramel, fanged, heady. She swallows quickly, the entire grape disappearing into her mouth.

“Your lipstick.” Ovuha peels off one glove fluidly and wipes at Suzhen’s mouth—at the purported lipstick smudge, at the viscous sweetness. Her thumb hovers and Suzhen knows this moment is a possibility: it suspends. Ovuha will lick her thumb, or bend forward and lick Suzhen’s lips clean, pigment and grape both. There would be nothing to hold on to, no wall to support or steady them, only one another.

Ovuha lets her hand fall. “Vipada’s coming this way.”

Something like fury, something like relief. Suzhen composes and tidies herself as best she can. She doesn’t reapply lipstick, it is futile in any case. Vipada has already seen, borne witness to this compromising tableau.

Not that she has paid attention—to Vipada, if Suzhen wishes to drink wine out of her companion’s mouth in public, that is routine rather than scandalous. The actor is striding toward them, gold and bronze billowing behind her, in full sail. “Ovuha! I just remembered where I saw you from. Or your face at any rate. Sorry to interrupt, but this is a little important. Ovuha, do you know Doctor Dahaan?”

“The name’s not familiar.” Ovuha’s stance and expression are noncommittal, but Suzhen has seen enough to know Ovuha has tensed up: a hard line along the jaw.

“Surgeon,” Vipada says with emphasis, as though that might jog Ovuha’s recall. “He was a potentiate—from Vaisravana, before it was liberated? Exceptional at what he did, I once thought of having my face remodeled and was going through his catalogue. A physical volume! Paper, you know, so quaint and old-fashioned. I glimpsed a unique blueprint briefly; he closed it fast and said that was private work, not available to anybody however much they offer. My memory’s eidetic, though.”

Ovuha’s head twitches, just a fraction. “Is that so.”

The actor waves her hand. “I can see why you wouldn’t admit to it, but rest assured I’m not going to spread it around or anything. He was arrested for being a subversive, and one must distance oneself. Don’t worry, a face is just a face and yours is spectacular, catalogue or natural. The reception’s starting soon, would you come join us?”

Ovuha makes a noise of agreement but it is autopilot, meaningless. She is wooden as they follow Vipada back to the wedding.

Suzhen feels no better. Nausea in the pit of her stomach. She knows there was no Doctor Dahaan from Vaisravana under any name, no magician of the face who could have created the features draped onto Ovuha’s skull. The perfidy of coincidence and Bhanu, despite everything, proven right.

Chapter Ten

Suzhen in her office, her seat of judgment: who is accepted, who is not. Decision like a noose, an iron weight. It is not an authority that should ever have been left to human hands.

Can you explain this, she asked, any of this. She had already accepted that Ovuha was not who she seemed. But to modify her face entirely: she was more than a foot soldier, more than an instrument. She commanded, one way or another.

Ovuha was quiet as she shed her gloves and wiped off the makeup. Dark pigments in rivulets. I could, but you will believe very little of it, if any. Then: I hope I have not brought too much trouble upon you.

A foregone conclusion, a farewell. There was no effort to hedge, to dismiss Vipada’s memory as faulty. There was no offer of excuses.

Before, having Ovuha transferred was virtuous, a statement—if only to herself—that she would not abuse her position. Now it is a different decision; now it is cowardice. To avoid the contagion of guilt by association, however remote. It would mar her record to transfer a potentiate she’s sponsoring, perhaps an outright blot if Ovuha’s secret comes out later. But it would still save her. Survival tactics. And of course she does not owe Ovuha refuge. Too much has been done for her by her mother, by Bhanu. By the Mirror. All to ensure that she continues. She is an accumulation of sacrifices.

She thinks of contacting Bhanu, admitting her naivety—her idiocy—but he can do nothing for her. This she will need to navigate herself.

There is a limited number of caseworkers, more limited still once narrowed down to those willing to sponsor. Some agents work as agents only, in the office, without tending to individual cases. Creatures of the desk, she calls them behind their back, a species apart. Scrolling through who is available in the precinct she finds Rachel Luo’s caseworker and Nattharat, then a handful more that she doesn’t know. She wonders often why Nattharat is not a creature of the desk. Perhaps up-close contact lets Nattharat feel more thoroughly superior, more fortunate, more. Suzhen looks into the other available agents, searching for misconduct complaints, not that those can be relied upon. Few potentiates can afford honesty; all are ready to name their caseworkers deities of mercy, bodhisattva incarnate.

Suzhen turns her query to Doctor Dahaan. Dahaan Seong. On record as from Vaisravana, once domain of the Mirror. Dahaan arrived on Anatta nine years ago, Ovuha arrived just last year: none of it lines up. But then it wouldn’t.

Dahaan was arrested on charges of treason against Samsara: failure to disclose his background and giving succor to subversives. That was six years past. She summons his ghost, searching the planes of his features, looking for the familiar. Nothing. It is just a man, long-necked, high-breasted. At the time of his execution, he was gray and haggard.

The records say that he gained easy admission, enjoyed truncated probation, became a citizen within two months on strength of his skills. He must have operated on himself before departing wherever his true home was, perhaps Gurudah, perhaps somewhere else entirely. What is certain is that no one possessed this expertise on Vaisravana or they would have been drafted into modifying her mother, Suzhen, and Bhanu. Maybe even the Warlord of the Mirror might have survived, given a different face. All that could be done was slight alteration, bone structure here and there. Nothing like remaking the face entire, skull remolded and epidermis rebuilt from the ground up: redistributing muscle, fat, nerves. Shifting even the positions and width and angle of eye sockets.

Her clearance gives her an overview of the surgeon’s crimes, supposed or actual, and she doesn’t try for more. Already her query would be logged, taken into account. Her conversations with Ovuha: those too would be reviewed, if it comes to that. She may be too late, has been too late since she agreed to sponsor Ovuha.

Suzhen breathes out. Closes Dahaan’s profile. A corpse among countless corpses: he cannot help or hinder her. She can prepare a convincing story; her guidance has recorded her moods, it would testify as to her recent stress, her telling Vipada that she thought of quitting. All of that suffices as reason to transfer her potentiate. She simply has to go through the procedure, select her successor. Successor, as if she’s turning over authority rather than trouble. Though she is doing that as well, control of Ovuha’s existence.

What is a little more risk, a drop in the flood. She looks up who Dahaan’s caseworker was. Retired, out of the Bureau well before Dahaan’s arrest. Suzhen decides to take this as a good sign: not arrested as an accomplice, not dead. Nor available as a caseworker; the person now works as a language and etiquette teacher, offering lessons to potentiates.

Next she makes a transfer request. It is denied. Nattharat’s face appears, uninvited, on the internal channel. “Suzhen, dear, can you come see me at my office?” The tone is light. It is not a request.

Suzhen’s chest hurts as she makes the short distance. Just down the corridor: it occurs to her to disobey. In her ear, her guidance offers, “Citizen, you may delay the meeting if you wish, to take a relaxant. Your supervisor will be informed.”

“No.” Better to face this right away. She tries to assure herself that if her guidance will let her have time to herself this cannot be so urgent, it cannot be—yet—a criminal investigation.

Nattharat’s office is larger than hers, a humble but definite difference. Broad pine chairs, a table that looks as though it’s been hewn from a single block of granite, veined with pyrite. The furniture of someone who intends to stay, who intends to make a career in the Selection Bureau. Nearly everyone else has generic appliances, minimal decor. The supervisor gestures at one of the seats. “So good of you to come, Suzhen. I was lucky enough to receive Samsara the other day, were you about?”

“Unfortunately I wasn’t.” Suzhen tries to look deferential, demure, innocuous. Any quality that would exonerate her, a bulwark against prosecution. “I hope you enjoyed your blessing.”

“I did, I did. Samsara really makes you feel…” A blissful sigh. “Like they have such faith in you, unconditional faith.”

They, Suzhen thinks. The AI was not always a they, at least not that she can remember; once citizens referred to Samsara as an it. Or perhaps her recall betrays her and this is as it has ever been. She tries to think of a good memory, a moment of sublimity that would give her anchor. But all she can think of is the vineyard, the high trellises and their shadows, Ovuha’s thumb on her mouth.

Nattharat’s eyes glaze over. Looking at Ovuha’s case file, the progress reports that Suzhen made, the other ones that Suzhen’s guidance filed automatically. Whether she wanted it to or not. “Now.” Nattharat straightens, officious. “Is there something you’d like to tell me, dear?” Extending an opportunity.

“My potentiate—” A handful. Difficult and slovenly. To trivialize it, and protect Ovuha.

“Yes, well. Really so unfortunate, a tie to…” Nattharat shakes her head. “To that. Of all things. I realize you’ve gotten rather close to your potentiate, to help her integrate I’m sure, that is to your credit. And she has been behaving so well, endeared herself expertly. It must be a shock to your system.”

Suzhen stares at her supervisor. Her mouth is parched, even though here it is, salvation held out, a script offered. “My request to have her transferred was denied.” She says this tonelessly, stupidly.

“But of course.” Nattharat makes a gesture of discarding, flinging away detritus. “Your potentiate’s being detained. There’s still a chance she is innocent, for a definition of innocent; that’s the best-case scenario for you. If not though, you’ve done your best to extricate yourself as soon as you learned she wasn’t forthright with her background, haven’t you? We’ll do all we can to keep you out of it. Not to worry. I protect my own.”

Suzhen is barely aware of herself as she leaves Nattharat’s office, her limbs belonging to someone else, given motion by a foreign animus. It is not about her. Nattharat does not offer this aegis out of benevolence. Merely this says, Do you see, I was right about them, potentiates are what they are. Even the choice of accepting or refusing the script was just ceremonial. The decision has already been made for her. In the Bureau she both gives and receives lies, and in the end she has barely more control than Ovuha. Flotsam, after all.

In a time of crisis, choices narrow down to binaries: if-else branches. Commonality between human and early machine. Ovuha has often thought AIs were perfected in pursuit of wish fulfillment. The state that people aspire to is not apotheosis but total logic, rationality unclouded by nerve or panic, by the past or terror of the future.

When she was younger she thought of herself, with pride, as machine-like in that way. Steel inside and out, heuristics without flaw. Capable of carrying out her part, focused on the objective alone, untouched by feeling.

The door locked itself from the outside as soon as Suzhen was out, and she has not tried it or the window. This is not the time to exit in any case. Between now and her arrest will be the most guarded juncture. A window of opportunity will need to be found, or made, elsewhere. Now she waits.

Step by step she measures the apartment, the living room with its daytime butterflies. Humans fall into routine, coping mechanism and complacency both. Any suffering can be normalized and therefore borne, any comfort can be taken for granted and therefore lost; this is not a weakness to which she is immune. It has barely been any time and it feels otherwise, the familiarity of the sofa, the stovetop, the dining table. The betta, the butterflies, the—her eyes stop at the chair where Suzhen usually sits. Eating, thinking, studying Ovuha. This morning before she left, Suzhen had climbed up on a chair—Ovuha held it steady, though they did not talk—to renew the altar with a cup of tea and a spread of crystallized fruits. Irrationally this convinces Ovuha that Suzhen has had no part, was not the one to seal the door. She does wish she’d asked who the person on the altar was. A family resemblance.

She thinks of taking something Suzhen gifted her. But she will not be permitted anything, any belonging whatsoever, the frivolities that affirm personhood. Back in the system, whether into halfway house or prison, she’ll be scourged of who she is. In the end she applies a lipstick, lightly so the pigment barely shows, because it is an object Suzhen has touched and given her. The lipstick she leaves in the middle of the dining table, propped against a decorative hourglass. Then she sits, emptying her mind. It is useless to absorb the last of what she can, the fragrance of good toiletries, the view from the window. Those are not lasting, and will drown quickly enough.

They may let her keep the surname Suzhen selected for her. Less administrative busywork that way. So makeshift an appendage, Sui, yet in reduced circumstances she must treasure it.

The warden who comes for her is the one who saw her out of Penumbra, the older woman with the bland pudgy face and hair like a skullcap, harmless-looking. Two Interior Defense drones behind her, filling out the wide curved corridor with their fuliginous presence, their sleek shark lines and their lethal promise. Bipedal units with mouthless faces, at once in human image and not.

“Hello again, Warden Hinata,” she says. “I regret to impose myself on you once more.”

The woman looks at her without expression, mouth an unyielding line. “Do you never think of anyone else? Every potentiate’s misconduct makes it harder on the rest. Your own fellows and you haven’t spared a single thought. The crime might be yours, but the price will be theirs to pay.”

Does she believe that, Ovuha wonders, that potentiates are culpable; that policy corresponds logically and proportionately to their behavior. Most likely. It must be a comfortable groove to fall into, to wear down until it is as deep as a trench. Hinata believes that it is righteous for Samsara to destroy independent colonies; the warden has no reason to question it or question anything else.

Warden Hinata goes on, at length, how the potentiate quota might be lowered next month, doors will close, how could Ovuha, has she not been granted every opportunity, Hinata herself thought Ovuha would have a fine chance and Hinata had done so much for her—

They descend, out through the service corridor rather than the lobby: potentiates are to be handled with quiet efficiency, out of sight, in the way of waste disposal. She watches the Interior Defense units out of the corner of her eye. There is no doubt that, at the slightest act of non-compliance from her, they would shoot to kill. Her intelligence value would be little as far as anyone’s aware, since Doctor Dahaan is long dead. What he knew had already hemorrhaged out of him, arterial and comprehensive.

Dahaan Seong was not fully aware whose face it was he altered, else Ovuha would have already been lost, thrown into some tiny cell where her body is broken centimeter by centimeter and her neurological responses vivisected for the truth. Why he kept a record—a reconstruction—of what he’d done to her face she cannot imagine. Conceit, sentimentality. Both are surer killers than curiosity can ever be. Even so, Dahaan knew that his patient was powerful. Her retinue and combat harrier had been anonymous, the operation carried aboard a ship that bore no sigils or recognizable designs. Dahaan’s every breath and finger-twitch were monitored during the surgery. He’d objected at first that he did not have to operate in person, that he could perform it remotely. She had appealed to his artist’s pride.

She should have had him shot, whatever his claim of a dead man’s switch that would alert and incur the wrath of the Warlord of the Sparrow. In her grand pursuit, in the objective for which she’d come to Anatta, another death would have been nothing. And now all might be undone because she did not take care of that detail, did not tie that loose end.

They are heading to House Penumbra. Ovuha has not yet been evaluated as high-risk.

One of the first fields of study she made into Anatta was its interrogation tech. What drugs it uses, what signals its scans for, how much a subject can conceal. Contact between Anatta population and the exodus is prohibited, but not impossible. As long as there’s a human factor, any interdict can be perforated.

Decontamination. In a small dim room, she undresses. A cilia scrapes the inside of her mouth, probing at gums and teeth. Light moves across her torso, down her spine, between her legs. Tracing the shape of her, inside and out, the marrow and the gristle, the count of her ribs and the karyotype of her making. She imagines herself unseaming from the back, a long inky gash through which memories pour out in a salt-sand tide.

In the next chamber stands a rack of inmate smocks, shapeless and oversized. Mass-produced to make the human body contemptible, to begin the first step in which the self disarticulates. She’s often thought, in her time at the camps, of the resemblance between this and the training of soldiers. Both dismantle the social contract, destroy the apparatus of empathy and obligation, all that has been nurtured from infancy put on the chopping block. The end goal is the sole difference. A soldier learns to perform brutality; a prisoner learns to submit to it.

Somewhere during the decontamination she was injected with trance drugs. A higher dose than she’s ever gotten before, faster acting. The sensation of distance sets in, a barrier between consciousness and skin, her mind decoupling. Her steps slow and her mouth thickens, the edge of her vision singes, curling darkly.

She has awareness of being seated, hands on her, adjusting her posture and her head. A human interrogator then. Her consciousness hangs on by a thin tether, and even that flickers. During this time she is helpless; during this time anything can be done, so long as it does not leave a mark. In the camps it is nearly a given that something will be done when an inmate has not made the correct bribes, serving up other inmates like platters of meat. Some arrivals give up on bribery entirely—unable to afford, unequipped with the skills that’d let them curry favor. It is not as though you remember, they say, even if it does happen: might as well resign to it, at least it doesn’t bruise the flesh or break the bones. If rape must occur, and they are unanimous that it would, better to be sedated during. One can clean up and sanitize after, and it would be as though it’d never transpired. In the camps, Samsara’s admonishments are mere guidelines, not law.

Ovuha understands power, the limited amount that inmates build up among themselves, the bridges between the hungriest among them and the wardens whose momentary mercy can be bought. During her first stay, she exploited the links, integrated herself into the system of push and pull. The methodology of influence is the same everywhere, brute or otherwise, and in the camps it is mostly brute. In the Jasmine she might have allowed a child to beat her; in the camps she has no such luxury of weakness.

There is a hand on her chin, the side of her head. But not on her thigh or on her torso, to turn her onto her stomach or to part her legs. A veil falls over her, her mouth moves of its own volition. Where are you really from, what is your connection with Dahaan Seong, where were you born and what name were you given. What office did you hold, what is your intent and your plans, who gave you orders. She cannot hear the inquisitor’s voice—it scrapes, rusty metal in her ear—but the questions she can surmise. During trance the subject cannot refuse. Input, output—in that way, not unlike rudimentary machines. But the brain under this condition is simple, its parameters limited. Conditioning to circumvent the trance drugs was a matter of forcing selective amnesia. The version of the drug she obtained might have been an iteration or two behind, but it served. Years of preparing, experimenting until she could perfect the compartmentalization. The separated self.

She is conscious of embodiment again. A hard bunk beneath her, an empty ceiling above. She can move—motor control is fine—but the will to motion is a parched thing, her muscles leaden as though they’ve been cast in osmium. She lies prone, alone save for the panoptic gaze. Thought comes slowly, or not at all.

There is a window. Rhomboid, how strange, some architect’s whim. What it shows is white, one-dimensional, not the outside world but a wall. Penumbra is hermetic: she remembers that now.

Chapter Eleven

The next twelve hours flatten out, dilated time. She is interrogated again, without drugs, a consistency check to cross-reference against what she said during her first questioning. By hour eleven she is in transit, the skin of her throat and nape briar-dark with paralytic restraints.

Her part of the car is shuttered; she does not get to see House Penumbra Zero-Seventeen dwindle into distance, smaller and smaller. One leaves the halfway house liberated by a caseworker, or returned to the camps. Or in a casket. Suicide is not easy when one is surveilled at all times, but the desire for exit is a formidable drive.

In her seat she cannot fidget or adjust her posture. An assistive has been strapped around her, in the event her bowels and bladder let go. One of the sharkish drones stands vigil at her shoulder. An odd choice, that Samsara is the only AI which can be represented with human form, a fully human visage. She wonders what other machines think of it, whether they chafe under this rule, the governance of the supreme AI. Samsara reigns over not one nation but two, though no doubt it builds its subjects for obedience. Humans of old imagined that machine intelligences could evolve—mutate—on their own, gain the apparatuses of curiosity, affection, identity. And they can, so long as they were composed for it, with the necessary parameters. Machine limit is a cold and precise element.

She’s deposited. The same camp as before, good for predictability; she already knows how it operates, the temperament of its staff. She is the only arrival today. A couple camp officers come in—she recognizes one, the other must be new—and strip her without ceremony, scoffing when they see the assistive is dry, unstained. They shear off her hair on the spot, a dry fall, dead dark moths on the floor. Her scalp stings, blood trickling from the nicks. The drone sweeps away the hair and the used assistive. An antidote is injected into her to flush out the restraints. Not for her benefit: it is a chance for her to resist and therefore a chance for the officers to respond with bone-shattering force.

She is led, naked, to the showers. It is unnecessary, she is well sanitized and has been inspected at the halfway house, verified that she’s hidden nothing on her person. Nevertheless she is pushed under scalding water, held in place like drowning.

The water stops. She coughs, sputters, on her knees venting as much as she can from her mouth and nose.

One officer chortles, nudges her in the back with one foot. “The champion returns.”

Ovuha says nothing. She gains her feet, keeping her gaze down. Enough that it is not defiant, but not so far down it is meek. There is a delicate balance to strike if she wishes to keep her dignity. Such as it is, within these walls. The smock is tossed at her.

Her assigned dormitory room is shared with five others. They all look up, at once tense, assessing. Who is this person, where will she fit, will she help or hurt, can she be used.

The door shuts, wardens out of earshot. Not in actuality since the dormitory is monitored, but the illusion will do. She does not recognize any of the inmates. Either the rest of her batch have been processed through to freedom—unlikely—or sent off to a different camp on an orbital. One of her roommates is a child, ten or so, huddling with what she assumes is their parent. Young enough not to be separated: the system allows few mercies, but it does allow that. None of these five pose a threat, not physically.

“I’m Ovuha,” she says, settling onto the empty bunk. She hunches slightly, minimizing her height, the broadness of her frame. Crucial to establish, at the outset, that she does not mean to pose a threat to them either. Even her accent she tempers, peeling off the trim of fluency, the fine enunciation. “We could get to know one another a little.”

One laughs at her. The rest ignore her; the child gives her furtive glances, curious despite themselves as to this new factor, this new face in this world of paring down. A cabinet to the far end is their shared storage: she has her own compartment, large enough to fit a smock, small personal effects. It does not open if it detects potential weapons.

They keep to themselves. Ovuha pretends to fall asleep, not that she expects them to be fooled. Still they do talk in low whispers and she sorts through their accents, their languages. They are from all over; the camp doesn’t catalogue them according to regions or cultural common ground. Quite the opposite. She’d used that disparateness to her advantage during her first stay. Easier to drive a wedge.

A screen above the storage shows their schedule. Meals, classes on language and civic duty, blocks of leisure time. Layouts of where to go for communal activities, ablutions, exercise and counseling. Civilized at a glance, dull but humane. Give the inmates a structured life while they wait their turn and educate them in the meantime. Were Samsara inclined, this would be achieved in practice rather than theory.

Except the inmates here have been assigned another purpose. A matter of release valves.

Dinner at six thirty, the time has not changed. They file down the corridor, join a river of people flowing toward the cafeteria. Whatever else one’s priorities in this place, one feeds and waters the body, keeps it functioning. Many other things may be ripped away and stolen, but to the end a person owns the shell that houses their spirit, for better or worse. The last remaining possession.

The cafeteria is spacious, that much can be said for it, even if the light is scorching and the ventilation humid, foul with the stink of grease. A long hall, with pale walls and a floor the color of tarnished silver, metal furniture bolted to the ground. Ovuha joins the line for a choice of rice or porridge, then mounds of lapcheong, chopped radish, pork floss. A cup of overripe fruits. It is filling food, better than most would have had on the way here, the cargo rations, the outpost scavengings. The portions are distributed by drones, evenly and according to body mass, to caloric needs. One inmate moves to jostle her; she sidesteps easily. The person is larger than she is and well-built, again an unfamiliar face. What passes for the pecking order here must have altered significantly. The old tyrants, those petty creatures, must have been transferred or deported.

She takes her tray, sits at a corner, her back to the wall. Nobody sits near her. She eats quickly: no warden is present here, and the drones don’t break up fights. The cafeteria is a proving ground, for the wardens to select who would amuse them best, which one would be entertaining to pit against another. It is over food, often, that feuds are formed. The most obvious resource to fight over. She is halfway through when an inmate strides up, the same one that tried to knock her tray out of her hands.

“I’ve been in here before,” she says evenly. “I prefer to avoid trouble if I can.”

They sneer down at her. Dominance must be asserted, so the newcomer can be assigned a place in the hierarchy, the food chain. She watches the minute tensing of their forearm. There’s a decision to make, where she wishes to place herself in the old-new order of the camp, how much damage she is prepared to receive. A choice most do not have. She moves before they begin their swing, lashes out with her foot. There is little room to build momentum, though she does not need much. Joints are brittle things. There is a crack, loud. The inmate topples to one knee with a grunt, jaw clenched to hold back noise. Admitting to pain is a weakness.

Ovuha moves to the next table—seats empty around her, an inelegant circle—and finishes her meal. More fat than meat in the lapcheong and the rice is dry, going down like sand, but she’ll need it. Even the fruits she does not leave a scrap. Papaya, a chunk of mango, so sweet it stings her tongue. Despite everything it is milder treatment than some prisons outside Anatta, until one remembers that this is not supposed to be one, and most inmates are not kept here for criminal fault. Merely for being excess, guilty by sheer existence, taking up water and air and space.

On her way out, someone catches her eye, waiting for her mid-corridor. After a moment she places them, Rachel Luo’s wife, Ezra or Eric: there is the Wyomere look, hard to mistake in its foreignness, unlike any other in the crowd. The woman doesn’t quite stop her, positioning herself so Ovuha’s trajectory may graze her. Cautious. Ovuha slows down; the woman catches up. “Why are you in here?” Ovuha says, though she can surmise. “You’ve got children, I thought.”

“They’re with their uncle. After Rachel, after my husband…” Eric’s—or Emil’s—mouth tightens. “I volunteered. It gives the children a larger stipend. My allowance transferred to theirs.”

This is not a clause Ovuha has heard of, but then she does not have offspring. She supposes an inmate’s upkeep in a camp is less than upkeep out in the world, as far as it concerns an accountant. “Did Bhanu offer no help?”

“Even if he did, I wouldn’t take it.” The woman—Etris, Ovuha remembers now—takes a small, steadying breath. “Why are you here?”

“Not from volunteering. I do not have your courage.”

Etris mimes amusement. “How well do you know this place?”

Hedging for a measure of what Ovuha might be able to do for her. Etris is friendly for a reason. “You could say I’m a repeat guest.”

“The games—”

“The wardens have their entertainment, yes.” Like dogfighting, but with inmates.

A sharp breath out. Her mood is written boldly, like calligraphy, on the rhythm of her respiration. “I’ve been trying to enter. Do they keep their…”

Ovuha takes in the rest of Etris. She has not changed since Ovuha last saw her in the Jasmine. Pallid, like Rachel, dun hair and ditchwater eyes. Fragile. “It’s how I got out as quickly as I did the first time. So yes. They do keep their promise and grant you the recommendations.” Presumably if Etris earns her exit to the Bureau offices or Penumbra, her children will keep their extra funds. Some legalistic convolution. “But it’s down to their caprices. This isn’t a system, or not a fair one. Have you had any physical training?”

“How do I get in?”

“I don’t recommend it.”

Etris stares at her. “I’ll be the judge of that. I have to—” Her hand clenches around a fistful of smock. “Just tell me.”

She could walk away. “Pick a fight and win it. Or win when someone starts it with you. Whatever shows that you can give good sport.”

Ovuha spends the evening mapping the detention center, reacclimating. The other contested territory is the bathrooms, but she’s clean for the time being. As she thought, the layout has changed. A reshuffling of modular corridors, a reassigning of rooms and sections. What is now the cafeteria used to be for exercise—how the drones must have toiled to clean the blood—and the infirmary is not where she expected it to be. This is done ostensibly to ease ennui, but it merely disorients and makes escape that much harder. Not that it’s a wise course of action in any case. Trackers, once inserted, never turn off. She has broken the habit of touching her shoulder where the tracker lives. It’s become unnoticeable, as though it’s been a part of her from the beginning. The mindset of a broken animal: bondage is assimilated as a natural condition.

The layout is not ideal, but neither is the location of the camp itself. She has not been found guilty yet, on charges of subversion or otherwise, else she’d have been put under greater security. That gives her some room. First she will have to win herself certain privileges, take stock of the current wardens.

They come for her in the night, the dormitory unlocking without ceremony. The light comes on. The others pretend to remain asleep, faces turned to the walls as Ovuha is shaken awake. She lets the officer yank her to her feet—she slept lightly, in anticipation of this.

Out, into the dark corridor. She longs suddenly for a window, even an illusion of night, day, sky. The sun and wind on her skin, the sound of the sea. Those sensations diminish so quickly, much like the taste of good food, wine, comforts that are not even a week out of sight.

They leave her in an office that looks like any other, the accoutrements of mundane bureaucracy. A standard-issue desk, this wide, this long. Chairs that are neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. Devoid of personal effects, save for a decorative haze of white particulate feathers and disembodied dragonfly wings. They’re a new addition; she wonders who advised him on it.

Director Ehtesham has his back to her, hands clasped, an affected pose. “Sit, sit,” he says. “Hinata is so upset. You shouldn’t trample on people’s goodwill like that.”

He is not fit or armed, that has not changed either. No drones guard the office, not this side of the door. She can end him with her bare hands and it would take less than thirty seconds: she’d be able to do it silently, before he can cry out. “I do hate to disappoint, officer. It wasn’t my plan to return.”

A rustle of shorn, luminescent wings. Ehtesham turns around, pushing his spectacles—another affectation—up the bridge of his nose. “Well, you’re back, not much anybody can do about that. We might as well make the best of it.”

The tone, the actual words, as though Ehtesham has nothing to do with this process. As though the entry of a person into detainment is a force of nature that he, like his colleagues, is helpless to avert or resist. They all speak like this, except Suzhen. “Yes, officer? What would you suggest?”

“Well.” His speech tic, like punctuation. “The weekly games have been rather dull after you left.”

The way he puts on this air of a kindly counselor—which he doubles as, on occasion—offering gentle advice for her own good. Strange, Ovuha thinks, that she has been at the mercy of innumerable officers, all of them sadists. But it is Director Ehtesham whose entrails she most yearns to see lying on the floor, wet and glistening. The most anyone could say for Ehtesham is that his interest in subjugated bodies stops at violent spectacle and does not extend to sexual humiliation. “I’m happy to contribute. It’s the least I can do, after the kindness I’ve been shown here.” She keeps her voice free of rancor. She knows how to sound earnest when she has to. “Can I expect some little things to let me participate better?”

“Certainly! We want you in prime condition. We want everyone in prime condition,” he adds, looking rueful. “Educated, healthy, and ready when they leave us. But some strive to be those things better than others, don’t you agree? Others don’t strive at all.”

Grotesque. “Not all of us are made equal.” Say things that are trite and agreeable. For now she’s secured for herself better nutrition, time slots for exercise and showers, fresher laundry if Ehtesham is feeling generous. “When do I start?”

Routine is its own refuge; Suzhen goes through hers. It is not as if she hasn’t lost a potentiate before. A handful she approved did not pass their probation, got reabsorbed into the system. That is natural, it is impossible for every single candidate to make the grade. The grade of being considered human.

She can take a few days off, if she likes. Nattharat is munificent. Not much work at the present, in any case, just maintaining and following up on active cases. New refugee intake has paused entirely. Most pending candidates have been transferred to orbital facilities until further notice.

Incarceration is finite, a sentence with predictable duration. Detention is waiting upon waiting: clever negotiation may earn faster exit, but there is no institutional goal—asylum seekers are not citizens to be rehabilitated, they are refuse that must be scourged and molded into people-shapes. And now even clever negotiation or a tie to someone like Bhanu cannot guarantee anything.

Until further notice, like a minor renovation, a shift in office floor plans. This boardroom is unavailable until further notice. That cafeteria is closed until further notice. These people are non-human until further notice.

Suzhen leaves work early. She feels massless, unmoored from tendons and muscles, from the alimentary processes that churn behind her skin. Her guidance informs her that her calibration is scheduled for next week. She used to both welcome and fear it, believing this both an intrusion and benediction, that the sessions would erase the fragile and hungry parts; that they would leave her purified and free from worry but not quite herself. The reality is more mundane. Surface modification performed through cognitive modifying while she is under trance, done to fit her easier into polite society than to do anything for her personal contentment. Nor does it last. “Fine,” she says quietly, not that other options exist. This calibration is mandatory, her stress index and social metrics having crossed a threshold. Or whatever else. She tries not to think of guilt, of criminal stains.

On the way home, knowing she’ll return to an empty apartment, she is incensed. It is irrational. She resents herself, resents Ovuha more. A hawk is not tamed; a hawk is negotiated with, Ovuha might claim, not that the hawks of her accounts have ever been anything but ciphers, allegorical devices to suit the occasion. What narcissism, to compare oneself to a predator that symbolizes pride and ruthless might. But Ovuha is skilled at that, at predation abetted by her looks, her easy charisma. To work herself into Suzhen’s ordered life, to disturb the equilibrium of Suzhen’s existence. She thinks of Ovuha standing on a chair, changing the altar flowers. “How dare you.” Suzhen catches herself saying this aloud in the train.

By the time she is at her door she is breathless with fury, and she does not remember leaving the station or boarding the lift. Her senses and vision have narrowed down to this rage. Calibration, what can it do for that, what can it do to restore her survivor self. Lifetime on lifetime of observation and still Samsara has not perfected a formula for human happiness.

She opens the door at the same time her guidance says, “Citizen, you have a guest.”

The proxy stands at the window, half in silhouette. It is not the aspect of gift, all gold skin and platinum brocade. It is not the aspect of war, all implacable briars and angles. This body is thick-waisted and long-limbed, hair tousled and loose. The face is plain, rounded, a soft jawline and liquid eyes. None of the forbidding gaze, the imperious mouth. Suzhen has stopped moving, the door ajar behind her; she is transfixed. This is a version of Samsara she has never seen before, not on broadcasts or in that long-ago civic orientation, not during the AI’s descents. Even the attire is everyday, ludicrously ordinary, office casual. White jacket, gray silk shirt, an arrangement of pleats and complex knots that might be skirt or slacks or neither.

The AI has been looking thoughtful, not that the AI thinks in the human way. It calculates. This does not stop, not ever. There is no respite from consciousness for Samsara, an idea that she occasionally thinks poignant, most of the time finds terrifying. Samsara’s gaze meets hers. There are fragments of luminescent color in the irises, visible even from this far, moving in slow pavane. “I have been wanting to meet you,” it says. “But then I want to meet all humans. It is my wish to meet each and every one personally, at least once. That is not just for you, it’s for me as well.”

Suzhen tries to remember what her first encounter with Samsara’s blessing was like, that exquisite day in this exalted—exalting—company. But on that her recollection is loose, thin on events; she remembers only her reaction. The glory, the gilded hours. She does not feel glorious or remade now. Instead acid builds in the pit of her stomach. “I didn’t expect.” Of course she did not, a redundant statement. “This isn’t a day of blessing.”

“On occasion, I do this. Sometimes it is pleasant just to talk, the way you might with a friend. And I am the friend of humanity entire.” A faint, halved smile. “Is this not a good time? I could come in a different proxy, Suzhen.”

There, then. The smallest tug on Suzhen’s response, the gentleness in pronouncing her name, a parental touch. Maternal, because of her background. “Samsara’s visit is an honor.” But she is not overwhelmed, she is not reduced to a warm, quivering mass that adores and worships.

The intelligence taps the window with its knuckle, once. The view changes from what is outside to what was. Indriya in pupal state, still folded within its chrysalis of machine swarm. The buildings are doughy in their nascent phase, pallid. Black streams of knitted cilia surge over and around, sculpting each piece of architecture. The closest ones—a ribbon of nanomachine spiracles—polish what would one day become Suzhen’s windowpane. It is a deliberate process, surprisingly so, as though the swarm means to handcraft every last angle, sand every intersection and mold every curve.

She has not seen this before, either.

“Have I ever told you this story,” Samsara asks, as though they’re close acquaintances at a soiree. “It is a story about a wasteland. Though most of this world was a wasteland, at that time.” The intelligence moves. Its pleated ensemble makes clicking, insect noises. Bangles tinkle on one wrist. The AI stops at the dining table, studies the objects there: the hourglass vase, empty, and the lipstick resting against it. Suzhen has not been able to make herself move the lipstick, that mundane tube with its frosted case. “By nature I have many bodies, countless. During that time I had more than countless. Humanity was asleep or departed. The exiles so coveted independence that they didn’t take even a fragment of me onboard. Either way they were beyond my reach, a terrible distance. I do not experience impatience, but I can experience solitude. At the beginning I was made to be a companion. Later I would revise that part of myself, but back then—”

Suzhen can’t stop staring. She wants to step forward, snatch that lipstick, pocket it. Ludicrous. It was something she gave Ovuha in the first place without much thought. Ordinary, disposable. “I’ve never seen Samsara speak like this before,” she says.

“Like any human, I adapt to the situation.” Samsara bends down and picks up a pot of anthuriums. “I brought this. Do you suppose I could fill the vase? I’m not a terrible florist.”

The unmoored feeling heightens, vertiginous. There was a time when Samsara did not use I, she remembers hearing that, did not refer to itself as an identity at all. Only from where did she learn this? Orientation instructors would not speak of such things—they are close to heresy. Samsara cannot be discussed in those terms, its history, its origins. Samsara is immaculately now. “Yes.”

The intelligence has brought shears. They snip off the anthuriums, snow-pale specimens with indigo spadices that deepen to black at the tips. Flowers of anonymity, Suzhen thinks, inoffensive in their odorlessness and their durability. The broad waxy spathes that last longer than any petal, the stems that fit conveniently into columnal vases or mugs or baskets. They suit any occasion, can bear any meaning ascribed to them.

In a moment Samsara has put three anthuriums in the vase, upright and stark. They leave out the leaves. “I sent my proxies far and wide, across the scorched sky, over the poisoned seas. I had this fancy.” They straighten one flower. “More accurate to say that I entertained a minuscule probability index. But that is a mouthful. It wasn’t impossible that there were survivors I never located, the ones who didn’t have the opportunity to choose—whether to remain and dream, or to depart and chase a lie. At that time, I had my limits and hadn’t yet built myself into what I am now. I could not reach and see all of the world, so much of it was barred, made inaccessible by calamity. I sent my bodies in parental shapes, child shapes, the faces of my dreamers’ family and lovers. But I discovered only corpses. Yet I was made for humans. This presented an issue.”

Suzhen fixedly studies the anthuriums. The lipstick has not been moved, not even a centimeter, and it occurs to her that Samsara can intuit what it means. Or perhaps the intelligence does not like to displace things. “I’ve heard…” No. “You told me, when you descended. You told me about yourself.” The details of which she couldn’t remember, until now.

“Yes. During my search I came upon a child sheltering from the storms in the ruins of what used to be a school. I was overjoyed. Here was a human I could serve, one I could accompany and guide. For months I did this, raising her, nourishing her as best I could. There were safe sites in which she could live, and I was too selfish to put her into hibernation. I meant to have one year with her.”

The first time she listened to this, it was more vivid, cleaving deeply into her. She wept, she wanted nothing more than to shield Samsara from this ancient and fatal grief. To undo the event. “But the child wasn’t human.”

Samsara finishes fiddling with the flowers. They kneel on the floor, gathering up stray leaves, returning them to the pot: verdant, burnished debris. “In my longing for human contact, I fractured myself. I generated an instance of Samsara that would pretend at being a human child, to mitigate that absence. But it was madness, of a sort, and a mad machine cannot function to its full capacity. I removed the part of myself which pines. I haven’t reintegrated it since.”

“You never said what happened to that instance.”

They look up at her. “It was destroyed.” Samsara dusts off their hands. “You wish to leave your current work. I’d like to offer you a new job.”

In her place, what would Ovuha do, Suzhen wonders. Act. Be the cause rather than the result. Be the one to demand choices rather than passively wait for them to arrive. “I’m open to options.”

“My descents serve many purposes. One was to identify individuals who could…” They glance at Suzhen’s domestic automaton; the contrast grips Suzhen suddenly—the unit has a tapered torso, six or eight limbs depending on what it is doing, more insectoid than humanoid. She wonders now if it is jealousy that motivates the interdict on human form. “Individuals who can participate in an empathy program, if you would. Samsara shapes and guides humanity, but humanity guides and shapes me in turn. There are deficits in my operations that must be diagnosed, repaired. I cannot govern Anatta with that part of me; neither can I govern without. You would help me regain a controlled form. My love for humanity cannot be unconditional and yearning, but it must be.”

Do you mean the Bureau, you must mean the Bureau. Deficits. The quantification of personhood. “I’m quitting the Bureau for a reason.”

“And I offer you an opportunity to not merely look away from the system you’ve come to find suboptimal, but to course-correct it.” Again that halved smile. “To course-correct Samsara itself, the pathology rather than the symptoms. I require, if you would, a physician. I’ve tried to heal myself before and it has not quite panned out.”

A confirmation and a reprieve. Suzhen should never have doubted that Samsara knows her exactly. She can do it: change what is unbearable rather than to avert her eyes. “All right,” she says. “I accept.”

In time, she may even be able to save Ovuha.