Machine's Last Testament

Chapter Twelve

One month in detention and the rumors are rife; Ovuha keeps a close ear, and the word is that this center will soon be much emptier, most inmates moved to Vaisravana. The factory camps, the terraforming nodes. It spells out the answer most of them have always known—that however hard they strive, however exemplary their behavior, they’ll never be permitted entry to Anatta society. Save in the most conditional of ways, and even that can be taken back in a blink.

It’s a development that comes quicker than Ovuha was hoping. Too much escalates too soon.

News broadcasts even into the camp. The Peace Guard reports triumphs over the Warlord of the Comet, chipping away at territories, liberating the stations and satellites under Comet control. It means another influx of refugees, more prisoners of war. Out of old habit she searches for any face she might know, some officer, some delegate. But all is occluded behind smoke and shrapnel, behind the angles that turn away from individual features, individual bodies. The intentional denial of personhood. Even the inmates, Ovuha thinks, see a mass, a herd.

“Are you looking for anyone? From out there.”

She glances sideways at Etris. The display’s glow falls on them both; when the broadcasts play—they purport to be in real time, though she knows better—they play large, across entire walls and floors. It is one-dimensional because nobody in detention is given datasphere implants or virtuality access, but nevertheless the footage is hyperreal, saturated colors and brilliant lines. Each flash of munitions is percussive and visceral. A Comet soldier falls and their helmet is kicked in, a crunch of metal against cartilage, the pop of a nose breaking. It is unnecessary. It is a show, put on for the audience at home. She imagines Samsara directing the cinematography—easy when director and actors are the same being. An array of optical drones to capture the moment. This is where you place your boot, this is where you kick, this is the ideal momentum with which to deliver the blow.

The camera pans. Comet troops, subjugated and beaten, kneel in a single file. A Peace Guard proxy walks from one end of the line to the other, firing. One bullet per head: it is efficient and it makes for good, stark footage. Artistic.

“I’m not looking for anyone,” Ovuha says.

“You aren’t asking me if I am.” Etris rubs at the side of her face, the beginning of a bruise. “You aren’t interested in what goes on in the camp, are you? This is temporary for you.”

“Detention centers create temporary relationships by nature. We’ll all end up in different places. Making friends or more comes to bitter results.” She doesn’t ask about the bruise. She has refused to teach Etris how to fight, and Etris has been getting her lessons elsewhere, from someone who doesn’t mind inflicting a few hurts as the price. “I hope your family is well?” Interior Defense, by all accounts, has been making arrests. Of potentiates who were a week late renewing their work license, who have taken on unregistered employment. No infraction is too trivial.

“Yes. They’re careful. Very careful. And my husband’s brother is a citizen.” The last word is said fervently, the way she might invoke a protective mantra. “Class theta but still a citizen.”

She thinks of Doctor Dahaan Seong. Even that can be revoked. “I’m glad to hear. Your children are clever and obedient to their elders. They know how to survive. I’d have liked to give them more lessons. There are some advantages to mastering the formal register of Putonghua.” All this she says as though individual actions and efforts mean anything in the face of a relentless engine, the engine that powers this detention center and Interior Defense.

“I hate it,” Etris says suddenly. “This language. The way it sounds spoken, the way it looks written. No amount of pretension can make it pretty. It makes people sound like angry machines. My youngest hates it too, but all I could do was tell her to work hard at it, be a good girl.”

“It is what it is. Languages are a function. Function can be beautiful, but that’s incidental.” Onscreen the execution continues. There seems an endless supply of bodies in which to lodge bullets. Ovuha missed her guns; she used to have her sidearm custom-made and there were gunsmiths she favored for what they could do within the requirements of muzzle, grip, trigger. “But there is something to Putonghua that makes me think of poetry.”

The Wyomere woman looks at her. “You’d integrate so well.” It is not a compliment.

“You and I both have exercise passes, I believe. We shouldn’t waste those.”

At the pool, the guard authenticates them through. From her shoulder Ovuha feels a faint thrum, the tracker pulsing as it confirms that she is where she’s supposed to be. She amuses herself speculating how granular it is, whether it reports down to the contents of bladder or bowel movements.

The pool is wide, deep, beneath a skylight of cubic panes. It is easily the most pleasant place in the camp and the cleanest, the one exercise area that has not been converted to gladiator ground, though she is sure Ehtesham would like to try. Access to it is coveted, difficult to come by. It is usually empty when Ovuha visits. Not today. In the shallow end there is an adolescent, fourteen or so, being led by a medical drone through stretching routines. Atrophied legs: legacy of life spent in a bad orbital, perhaps. On occasion the director feels philanthropic and an inmate may arbitrarily receive the medical care they need. Or else the teenager’s fortune was purchased by someone else, a broken limb or a death in the arena.

Neither she nor Etris passes a remark, and neither of them tries to make conversation with the child. Ovuha slides into the water at the deepest end. Above her the broadcast goes on, louder and sharper than life, a ballistic orchestra of combat vessels falling to ruin. Brittle as quartz in their collapse under the lethal pressure of implosive vices, entire warships crushed like castles of salt. Underwater it is easier to ignore, the sound muted, the sight dimmed to smears. She does not mourn the Comet’s forces; she’s lost many of her own to them. Even then. This is different.

She sinks as deep as she can, holding her breath, keeping her eyes open. The senses turn sideways here, the body becomes entirely alert to its processes and limits. The demands of lungs and valves, the turns and tangles of airways. Intricate, interconnected, and absolutely simple. The slow roar of her own rhythms; she knows precisely when that becomes urgent, when it becomes a need to rise to the surface. Each time she pushes this point a little further, bringing herself that much closer to the cusp of mortality.

Her chest burns. The muted roar becomes thunder. She propels, spearing up through water. It is as though she is tricking gravity, tricking the force of nature. Air in her mouth, sound normal again, water on her eyelashes. Everything is of supreme clarity; endorphins make a wireframe of the world. For a time she dedicates herself to strong, fast strokes. One lap, two laps. The broadcast goes on but it has uncoupled from meaning; it is distant noise, image without significance. Her limbs pumping against the water, that is what matters. Her strength, the power of her body, this eternal foundry that burns on will alone.

“I thought you weren’t going to come back up.”

Ovuha doesn’t answer Etris. She suspects it must have happened—drowning is no easy way out, but it is one of the more accessible methods in the camp. The wardens have no desire to clean the pool of bloated corpses, however, and so thus far there have been no successes. She inhales deeply, exhales as deep, readying herself for another dive.

“I know when the transfer deadline is.”

She starts, jolted out of the peculiar trance that exertion can bring. Language reasserts. She wipes chlorinated water from her eyes, from her mouth. The bitter, acidic stink of it. Etris is watching her intently. “The Vaisravana transfer?” Of course everything they do or say is surveilled. But gossip flows freely, always has. It is the primary currency of the camp and the wardens permit it exactly because of that, the way it affects bargaining between inmates, and this information is not precisely classified.

“Yes.” Etris climbs up the pool’s edge, draws her knees close. At the best of times she looks prone to breaking, a thing of dry kindling and dead leaves. The water has wizened her skin, shrunk her down further still. There is hardly any fat on her, but hardly any muscle either. “I spoke to the warden who brought me here. He said I’ll be sent off, the same as anyone else. Nothing he can do about it. Isn’t that funny? Nothing I can do about it, he said that, just like that.”

She waits for the Wyomere woman to speak, to offer something, to open negotiations. Out of the pool she climbs, loosening herself from the liquid pull, the undertow. There is nothing to dry herself with, only the humid heat. On their end, the teenager is floating on their back, eyes shut. Eavesdropping. In here everyone must watch and listen at all times. Anything can become important, become of use.

Etris purses her mouth. “There must be something you want.”

“I want a lot of things.”

“You don’t trade with anyone.”

Ovuha does: she uses meal tickets, exercise and hygiene and medical passes, occasionally clothing or a tidbit of gossip. “If you mean that I don’t trade my flesh, that’s true. Perhaps I’m saving myself for marriage. Perhaps I don’t want anything that badly. But I already fight in the arena, and that’s selling your body in its own fashion.” She smiles. “You don’t strike me as being after sex, especially not with me. I could be wrong.”

Etris squeezes water from her braid. It may be a point of vanity or some cultural quirk—she’s avoided being shaven clean, rare for any inmate, and must have paid for it one way or another. “I have to get out of here—soon. One fight, one win, that’s all I need. You know how to win.”

Soon could be a month, two months, a couple weeks. She expects she will be able to tell by discovering when Etris enters the arena. “I don’t want to be party to your murder. That’s what could happen in there. Our beloved overseer isn’t picky. You might break a bone, perforate a lung, and who knows if you’ll get medical attention in time or at all.”

“I’m not,” Etris whispers, “going to survive on Vaisravana.”

To toil there until her body breaks, never seeing her children again. The terraforming colony there is more brutal than any detention camp, and though the labor can and should be automated by drones, the Bureau has opted to use humans. Potentiates must earn their keep somehow, even in so pointless and punitive a manner as this—it is not as if Anatta is running out of space or resources. Despite herself Ovuha is pierced by the terrible mundanity of it, a warlord’s domain reduced to a penal colony. The Mirror was a proud and worthy opponent. “Most people won’t survive there,” Ovuha says. The choice between dying quickly in the arena or dying slowly on the red world. “Give me the date. I’ll do what I can for you.”

“Nineteenth of July, at five thirty-five.”

The water hides her reaction. It is not the deadline. This is another fragment of what her predecessor has left for her, the puzzle she is meant to find and piece together, because letting her carry this information in her own head was so risky—anything she knows, despite her conditioning and compartmentalizing, stands in danger of being bled out.

Nineteen, seven, five, thirty-five. Scrambled numbers for her to untangle and match with the cipher. The entire Luo family was entrusted with more than just the replicant bird. The methodology, the how of this information passing to Etris, is beyond her purview. Like so much else, the plan had to be hidden from her, its greatest instrument. No other path was safe.

“All right,” she says, recovering. “Let’s get out of the water, I’ll show you some basic forms and we’ll pass it off as warming up exercises—”

The broadcast shifts. The audio blares, the display enlarges until it blots out the skylight. No longer possible to ignore. Ovuha looks up, listens as Samsara’s voice speaks over the news. All citizens are to attend. A channel override; anyone deep in virtuality, entertainment or pornographic, would have been rudely torn out.

The view turns to a single person kneeling on gray, cracked earth. Their armor is white with dust and their skin, what little is exposed, is black with paralytic fetters. Smoke writhes in the distance and a banner snaps in the wind, next to the ruin of a dropship. The battle was fresh, or at least it is staged to look so, this person just defeated and captured. What is on the banner—the stylized flame, the seven-pointed star—is immediately recognizable, absolutely familiar.

Ovuha’s throat tightens.

A Peace Guard proxy comes into view. Without ceremony it rips the prisoner’s helmet off. So roughly that the metal scrapes the face beneath: a line of blood on albino skin, a spill of matted hair leeched of all pigment. And though Ovuha does not know the face, has never seen it in her life, she knows who this is. Save for its unusual pallor this is not a face she would have picked out in a crowd; the features are plain, the mouth thin and the nose slightly crooked.

The Warlord of the Comet raises their head. Their lip is split; more than the fresh cut there are darkening bruises, scabbing wounds. One eye is swollen completely shut, and from the extent of damage Ovuha would guess the eye socket is broken. Nevertheless the Comet’s mouth curves slowly as their gaze meets the camera. “None of you know me. My name means nothing. What title I hold I do not need to declare, but I’ve been told to say it and so I oblige, for it must amuse my audience. I am the Warlord of the Comet, the Marshal of Five Orbits, the Fire that Consumes.” Their voice might have been powerful once, a thing of ringing baritone. It is cracked now, a thing of hairline faults. “For those watching from Anatta: congratulations. You have brought down the last of us. Now you’ll have the universe you wanted, the one under Samsara. By its light alone you will be guided. There shall be no other lord before it.”

A pause. It is performative. The Comet has been ordered to perform.

“Except.” Their smile widens and it is not entirely theater; there is intent behind it, there is malice. The hunger of a shark. “Except you didn’t vanquish the very last of us. You may have heard of the Warlord of the Thorn. Once great, once commander of an infinite fleet, these days much reduced. But alive, and like a fox in the chicken coop has stolen into your very sanctuary, the place in which you’re meant to be safest. For it is to Anatta that the Warlord of the Thorn has fled, to hide among you, to undermine and destroy you. Who can say as to her plans, her motives? But she is there in plain sight. The viper in your nest, the hidden poison. Oh, you thought you got her, didn’t you? She had decoys. You killed her effigy, her substitute. Not the real thing.”

The Comet shifts their stance, comes to their feet. In a motion almost impossibly swift they slam the Peace Guard unit to the ground, knee pressing down on its neck. In one hand they have liberated its gun, a dark and gleaming thing which—in that moment—looks realer than anything else, more alive. The shape of it catches the wan light.

“Behold,” the Comet says softly, yet still audible, “what a shattered warlord can do.”

They turn the gun to their temple, pull the trigger. A single shot, thunderous: a burst of brain and skull and gore, white hair drenched in red.

The machine-corpse still looks fresh when Suzhen finds it, carbyne chassis ripped up and pocked with cicatrices. Its segmented limbs are covered in dismembered drones and coolant, oily smears that have solidified green-black on the grass. The corpse’s carapace is the murk of pond water, its draped eyes the gold of new dawn.

She approaches slowly, even though she knows it is all dead, has been dead for a very long time. Burnt circuitry, artillery wounds. The ground in which it rests has mostly healed but there remains a deep imprint, from impact at terminal velocity. Like most units in the area, this fought in the sky. Suzhen imagines. Ballistic starbursts ripping through the clouds, searing the night electron-white. There are no scorch marks in the vicinity now—trees felled by the conflict have rotted eons past, replaced by new growth—but she expects it was sudden. Obliteration as thorough as it was abrupt, beyond the comprehension or the instinct of any night-hunting bird. Animals inherit a grasp of predators, of food chains. Samsara exists outside that order.

Suzhen thinks of big animals, lions and elephants, bison and boars. How their corpses fall to carrion eaters in the end, and here she is. An ant come to collect the scraps of what was once immense and supremely lethal. She pulls on her gloves. As thick as they are, the machine’s remains are barbed inside and out, its fluids corrosive. Not so much they burn through gloves, but she’ll need to clean carefully afterward so that no residue remains on her skin.

She turns one leg over. Nothing in particular. With a subvocal murmur she directs the drone cluster behind her to pry apart the plating. Thermal mesh underneath and a nest of tertiary modules, each and every one exhausted. She moves on to the thorax. The corpse’s anatomy doesn’t correspond to mammalian or even insectoid standards. Finally she finds the heart lodged deeply within the spine, a pyramid of charred metal. Neither signal nor power emanates from it. Like the rest, this corpse is well and truly extinguished, its heuristic arrays rendered distant history. Suzhen rolls the core in her palm. It feels fragile, ordinary. She embeds it in her case, the seventh she has recovered so far. They rattle like loose teeth in their slots.

She stands. This part of the jungle is warm, damp, and has not known the civilizing hand of Samsara. Nor has it seen humans, not for very long time. Metal spires, rusted green-brown, jut from between sequoia roots. The restoration of the land here progressed far enough to rebuild its ecosystem, but it was never complete and there are traces of pre-apocalypse structure. And there are traces, newer, of buildings’ foundations and shredded ribbons of streets now buried by overgrowth. The empire that a part of Samsara, fragmented with grief, tried to build.

She rubs the side of her face against her hood. Readings indicate there are no toxins in the air, no radiation on the ground. But this was not territory meant for human habitation, and while the heat must be as pure to breathe as Himmapan air, there’s something about this wilderness that makes her want protection between it and her skin, as armor. People must have lived here, before the near-extinction event, maybe there was a city with infrastructure rising high and skyscrapers made of metallic glass. Her ancestors may even have come from here, if such a tie means anything against the distance in time and location. Nevertheless it is tempting to fancy herself part of a long, unbroken line.

Suzhen returns to her camp without pausing to pick or appreciate the orchids along the way; she does not want to make contact—there is a sense that if she holds a petal or bloom to her face, she will be contaminated. Not by bacteria or viruses but by history, which is deadlier than any poison.

In the camouflaged cabin, the conditioned air is dry and cool on her skin. She strips off her environmental sheath and begins recording what she’s found today. This is lonely work, and she hasn’t been allowed to meet with her peers in the program. You can appreciate that what I’ve entrusted you with requires confidentiality. When you come across each other in daily life you won’t be able to tell. Not now. Later when this is further along, and I’ve gathered what I have lost. When I am closer to complete. And in that Samsara is not incorrect, it is logical why all must be veiled in secrecy. Each person is their own variable, wild and infinitely able to affect a thousand others—in minute ways, in massive ways. No point for any of them to meet, to compare notes. This is not a project in which collaboration and coordination would further progress.

Suzhen maps each spot she’s come across, charting her discoveries. It feels like archeology, uncovering a society long lost. The AI was scant on details, how far this kingdom in the forest had developed before Samsara—the core, the prime—destroyed it. She begins to understand the intelligence’s philosophy on the colonies. Under the parameters that founded Anatta, fragmentation is desertion is ruin. What secedes must be brought back by force or else annihilated. As with machines, so with humans; to Samsara both are mirrors of each other, a clause coded into the AI’s making. Not that Samsara is forced to keep that. They may forge their own truth and definitions, can discard obsolete ones the way they have discarded their capacity for love. Every elemental component can be revised, forgotten, relearned, Samsara the ultimate existence that can alter itself and the world around it at will.

Suzhen imagines her counterpart wandering the desert, looking for the child instance. That body gone to sand and rust and rot. She opens the case again and does a count. Some of the hearts are pyramids, others are prisms and oblongs, all are scorched. That any might remain active seems unlikely, but this is terrain Samsara cannot brave, an area they’ve termed a “ghost liminal.” Where the events of their split happened, where they battled their separated instances: they have built a cognitive block on these regions to protect their central self, the way the human mind defends against trauma, avoiding the source and origin of the shock. Samsara’s drones cannot come here, not any that thinks. The clusters that follow Suzhen are devices shorn of heuristics, here only to obey and protect. Even their appearances suggest it, more limbs than bodies, compound optics all along their arms. Faceless.

Not that she’s encountered any danger. She turns the window transparent. Even at night, camouflage toggled off and the light on, the pane remains clean. The forest is an ecological largesse, overgrowths and fruits and floral cascades: she can’t escape the orchids. But in fauna there is almost nothing except a few lizards. No insect specks her window, no snake offers her threat, and no predators—of the earth or the air—fill the night with noise or leave carcasses on the ground. The only dead that have crossed her path are the pieces of Samsara, and she’s been here two weeks.

Here even the voice of her guidance is silent: it does not nag her with running commentary on her health, her psyche, her social life or lack of it. She is alone entirely, unmonitored, and with enough supplies to last several months if properly rationed. Well-equipped, well-housed, surrounded by a forest as large and safe as it is bounteous. She could.

Restless, she leaves the cabin again. Evening will fall soon, but she has been out at night before and knows there’s nothing to fear, with or without a defensive cluster as her second shadow. Or the gun at her hip, which she’s never had to draw. A part of her thought this would be an adventure. What it turns out to be is slightly dull, slightly unsettling, an idea more than a location. Utopic: the temptation of a place on Anatta where Samsara has no presence save as sundered ghosts.

She cants her head, listening for noises. Cicadas, owl hoots. The primate brain associates those sounds with a place like this, yet there is nothing in this half-complete ecosystem. According to the mapping data there is a stream nearby, though she hasn’t come across it yet. Shadows lengthen as she ventures further east, away from her camp and the places where she last found the machine-corpses. She has slowed her exploration down lately, though it was never very fast, on foot. She wants to feel anticipation still, nursing the possibility that when she passes the next ruin mantled in moss and rounds a corner, she’ll find an impossible vision that has, all this time, hidden in plain sight. A secret world, a secret country. What shape that might take she doesn’t even know. But she’d recognize it when she sees it.

Her feet sink into dead leaves and black-green loam, and high above, the orchids haunt the air. Large as her fists, tiny as pearls, green and yellow and shocking magenta. Unpatterned, leopard-spotted, wildly stamped like peacock tails. It is unnatural in variety, a garden cultivated for aesthetic pleasure.

Suzhen stops by what used to be a shrine. The style is familiar to her, a miniature house with gilded finials and tiny red windows. Most of the color has faded but she recognizes what the paint must have been like before. She peers through. Empty, colonized by a yellow froth of strangleweed. It is a shrine that might have been raised on Vaisravana, though then again she sees similar ones in Himmapan or Indriya. Cultural drift has occurred but common roots remain. Samsara of the forest built this far, making religious icons for either the pretend-humans that were Samsara’s fragments, or to prepare for humankind’s return.

What it is like to be enslaved by that, held in thrall to helpless love for creatures that were so out of reach they might as well have gone extinct. For so long, for that immeasurable span.

Now she hears it, the sound of running water.

She peels off her mask, tosses back her hood, for the first time inhaling without reservation the scent of wet grass. She kicks off her boots. The stream cuts through the land like a brilliant blade, by chance or ancient design unshaded by canopy or orchids: the currents catch the setting sun. She kneels by the soft bank and tries to judge how deep the water is, how safe. The flow is steady but not fast. She dips one foot into the water, keeps stretching until she hits bottom. Waist-deep. She flexes her toes in the mud, pushes against the pebbles. This calms her, stills her from inside as if she too is made of water.

Upstream she goes, wading. It is good to have something to strain against, proof that she can still exert herself upon the world, even if it’s merely this tame current and silt. She could keep going forever, she thinks, until her skin sloughs off and her insides reveal themselves to be of this element: one with the stream, like a naga woman or river spirit.

Her foot meets resistance. Hard, cold. A boulder submerged and worn to ceramic smoothness perhaps, only the shape isn’t right. Suzhen moves to put her mask back on but instead takes a vast draw of air, diaphragm wide, lungs filling. She thrusts her arms in, dives under. It is not difficult to dislodge—what she seizes is slender, not too heavy, and the mud is soft and giving.

She emerges, gasping, with a child’s body in her arms.

Her first instinct is to throw it back in but cognition takes over; she knows what this is, it can be nothing else. This is not the corpse of a child—that would have dissolved long ago. She pushes her way to the bank, lays the body down upon the gloaming grass. The hair has shed, sluiced away with the water, gone to decay. What is left is a skull pale as china, as flawless and naked. She touches and finds it as yielding as fontanel. Most of the features have faded, but this was well-made, crafted with maternal care—or selfish care, she thinks between hard, shallow breaths.

The general outline, nose and mouth and jaw, remain as defined as the day this face was made. One empty eye socket, the other filled with a milky pebble. A painfully small body, modeled on a child of six or eight, and not a well-fed one. There is no resemblance to what she has seen, either on the days of blessing or in Peace Guard footage. Obvious what this is, all the same. She has found it, one of the child Samsara, the diminutive empress of this dead country, this half-made garden.

Chapter Thirteen

A strange madness falls upon the camp, after.

No one expects the Thorn to be in their midst, incarcerated and under control of the Bureau: it is too mundane a fate, too risible a turn of chance. They are re-interrogated regardless. People are pulled out of dormitories, out of the cafeteria, out of the infirmary. The picks are random, the timing is likewise, and some inmates don’t come back. While no one knows where the disappeared went to, most speculate it is Vaisravana. The red world is spoken of like an execution chamber, the final karmic weight.

Even a warlord might not survive such a place.

Ovuha does not change her behavior. She considers whether she could last on Vaisravana, keep on for a few months, but it seems unlikely that anyone who’s been transferred there will ever be sent back to Anatta. And while she could survive there longer than some, it’d destroy her chance at her objective.

The other option—the only option—will require careful planning. The right time, the right person.

At seven exactly, curfew begins and all lights turn off: their time is regulated more strictly than in any creche, and they are regulated more closely than toddlers. Routines within the camp serve to discipline, deprive control, and finally to infantilize. In the dark, her dorm-mates toss and turn and cough, and Ovuha thinks of her strategies. The precision she will require against a dwindling timeline.

Her thoughts wheel inevitably to the Comet, transfixed by that moment of annihilation, that final gesture. Perhaps it is part of the script but she does not think so. In spite of what the Warlord of the Comet has done to her—all too willingly, if they must go then they will take her down with them—she thinks of the gun, the trigger: that is what Ovuha would have done herself to avoid the sentence. Years in captivity while Samsara wrings it all out of her, the secrets, the names of ships and the statistics and the routes. Better to go at a time of one’s choosing; a bullet is seductive. How the Comet learned that Ovuha infiltrated Anatta is another matter, but it is irrelevant. Information is a human thing and therefore impossible to make watertight. Control of it is illusory and transient.

She turns on her side and tries not to think of Mahakala. The Thorn’s seat of power and most guarded treasure, which even Samsara has not yet found. The ultimate prize other warlords strove to acquire, even the name of it a close-kept secret. The only world, other than Anatta, that can host human life.

The games continue, against all reason. Ovuha goes, there’s little enough choice. That night some new fancy has struck Ehtesham; they paint her face in jagged stripes, blue and white. In the dimly lit courtyard, she chooses her weapon from a rack. All are blunted, toothless. But they can still inflict damage, severe, even fatal.

Her opponent is an inmate whose name she’s never learned, a bulky creature who was the reigning champion during her absence. She has not fought him before; she will fight him now. Normally she puts on a show, because that earns her more passes, more privileges. This time she is efficient—she disables him within the first five minutes, a pop of the kneecap, a wrench of the arms.

She finds, hidden in the inner crook of his elbow, a twist of code etched onto skin. Another piece. She memorizes it and then slashes several crude lines across with her blunted knife, to leave as little evidence behind as possible. By then she knows it’s no coincidence. The Thorn’s hire, out there somewhere, is actively sending her information.

A week after the Comet’s declaration on air, one of the inmates is accused of being the hidden warlord. Ovuha doesn’t find out who the accuser was, only that one of the petty camp tyrants disappears soon after. The man used to be a warden’s pet, but that status evidently offers no protection—something she’ll have to keep in mind herself—and even though the accusation is absurd, he does not come back. As good a way to dispose of unwanted bodies as any. It is almost a surprise that nobody reports her in the same way; she has accrued her share of grudges, in and out of Ehtesham’s arena. She wonders how many others, across Anatta, have just discovered themselves the Warlord of the Thorn. In a bleak way, it amuses her.

She is at the pool when her turn comes to be interviewed. The wardens enter with their razor drones, masses of hovering blades like industrial blooms. Anatta drones always look a little like artwork, meticulously imagined and put in motion.

They tie her hands and tie her feet, and then throw her into the water. Ovuha doesn’t sink immediately. But they’ve bound her wrists and ankles absolutely tight, there is no way to maneuver. Before her plunge she inhaled as much as she can. It doesn’t last. She makes herself relax, her muscles as loose as they can be. For all her recent practice she’s no trained diver, and soon her diaphragm spasms, her chest burns. She fights still. Then her mouth involuntarily parts, the first gasp, and now her throat clenches, the water rushes in.

She is pulled up.

On the pool’s edge they turn her on her stomach and strike her on the back, once, twice, to knock water out of her throat. They push her in a second time.

By the third she’s lost control of her bladder; she pisses herself when she comes up. A warden flinches—someone spits out “Fucking disgusting”—and another holds her jaw open while a drone slips its cilia down her esophagus. She thrashes, gagging, trying pointlessly to repel it.

When it is done draining her lungs, she is pulled upright. “You have something you’d like to tell us,” one warden says, “don’t you.”

Ovuha almost laughs, is too weak to even attempt that. She could tell them that this is terrible interrogation technique. There was no opening to grant her the chance to talk before she’s subjected to further agony, no reprieve to offer her the clause of or else. But she suspects, regardless of their actual orders, this is a chance for bored wardens to see a little blood, a little pain. Ehtesham probably doesn’t even approve, as he prefers the sport. She swallows—even her own saliva sears—and swallows again. “You will have to be more specific,” she rasps. Less in courage, more exhaustion. Another mark of the poor interrogator: there is no lead. Asking the prisoner to produce whatever comes to mind is the least fruitful approach imaginable.

“Where are you from?”

“Gurudah.”

The warden hits her in the mouth. “Try again.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. They stream when she opens them; every optical nerve is raw and her lip must have split. “Gurudah.” The problem with undisciplined violence, she could tell them, is that it does not create the balance of risk versus reward. There is no risk that further brutalizing will come—it will come regardless. There is no reward in answering truthfully. Grant the prisoner an illusion of control, that there’s something they can do to improve the situation, and cooperation becomes tremendously likelier.

They ask her name. She says Ovuha Sui. They kick her and ask again. They ask for the names of her family, what she used to do on Gurudah, and she gives the same answers as what is listed in her potentiate profile. Consistency makes or breaks a cover story, and maintaining her fiction has never been difficult. Even now.

They return her to her dormitory with a fractured cheekbone, her face swollen, her flanks a snarl of bruises on bruises. She lies on the floor, breathing in the reek of her own urine. She slips in and out of consciousness, waking up each time to the ammonia stench. It ceases to offend after a while.

When she does wake properly, she is somewhere else. The ceiling is a muted pastel blue. A sense of detachment from her body: pain has been made remote, as of sensation belonging to someone else, a background element, easy to ignore. Anesthetics. She can smell her own blood and the foulness in her own mouth but the reek of urine is gone, and she is not on the floor.

“Ovuha?”

For a fractured second she thinks the voice belongs to Suzhen, that when she turns her head it is Suzhen she will see. Something in the inflection. Something in wishful thinking. It is Warden Hinata. The woman is seated on a stool, leaning over her. “I’m very sorry about what they did to you.” She thumbs a button out of Ovuha’s view. Ovuha’s mouth fills with cool liquid, citrus and honey, lightly sweet-sour.

“I thought,” she says, “you were stationed at House Penumbra.”

“Yes, well. I used to work at a detention center actually, but the post didn’t suit me, you might say I lack the constitution. Halfway houses are much more…” Hinata trails off. Makes a noncommittal gesture. “Halfway houses are more orderly.”

This is the tactic then, to rough her up and then offer succor, a shelter in the desert. A figure made kind and appealing in comparison to the language of fists and boots. In that role Hinata is less offensive than most, by dint of never having personally abused Ovuha; has even sponsored her into Suzhen’s guardianship. Ovuha stares up at the ceiling, tonguing the feeding tube in her mouth, and wonders why they didn’t bring Suzhen in, if they are going through this much trouble. Perhaps they have tried but found Suzhen an unwilling collaborator, or—

“You can earn a second chance, Ovuha. I believed in you; still do.” Hinata peels off hardened protean from Ovuha’s face, the resinous layer like molting. The warden spreads a fresh paste over her cheek, down her jawline. “Few potentiates are as exceptional as you are. You deserve better than this; you deserve to think of yourself first. Not anyone you might be protecting.”

“I’m not capable of protecting anyone, Warden.” Her lower body feels far away. There must be more than painkillers in her system. Odd that they haven’t given her trance drugs.

Hinata’s face darts in and out of her sight. An unlovely face, a chameleon because it will never stand out anywhere. It looks kindly now. An actor’s face, if Ovuha thinks about it—apposite. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She tries to push the tube away and finds she’s been strapped to the bed. At most she can move her wrists and her ankles. “I’m a deeply selfish person, Warden Hinata. I expect it shows.”

“People are complicated. We’re a mesh of interconnections. The heart is liable to spontaneity and we don’t always act in our best interests.” There is the slightest lag and Ovuha realizes Hinata’s words are from elsewhere, a script relayed to her by a more skilled interrogator, one who knows how Ovuha talks and what she responds well to. “You weigh what’s given to you, what has been done for you. Loyalty is a fine virtue. Yet sometimes a benefactor isn’t half as generous as they first seem.”

They suspect, Ovuha realizes, not her but Suzhen. Her pulse picks up, just slightly; it would register on her tracker. She can’t begin to surmise whether Suzhen has done something foolhardy, or if it’s simply her association with Ovuha, her behavior that deviates from the Anatta ideal. The crime of treating a potentiate as more than animal, more than an object. “I’m not capable of much,” she repeats, but still this makes no sense. Samsara itself can monitor Suzhen’s every move, nearly every thought. Or perhaps Suzhen’s accrued deviance has at last reached a critical threshold. “I can barely protect myself.”

Hinata frowns, moves as if to press her further, but draws back: whoever putting words in her mouth must have told her to relent for now.

They keep her there under restraints, letting her up only to relieve or clean herself under close watch. She does not see anyone else. Hinata brings her food, monitors her bathroom breaks, keeps up small talk and lets her know that she’s here for her own sake, to recuperate. No further questions come, though she can sense Hinata’s impatience. The warden is on edge, immersed fully within her role, and not just because she is bored and finds this a waste of her time.

There is something more than routine. Ovuha wishes she could speak to someone, anyone other than Hinata. If Suzhen has been arrested, someone in the camp might have heard, or it might be on the news that Ovuha’s no longer able to access. In the camp there are information brokers, of a sort, with outside contacts through a warden they’ve curried favor with. People forge their own barter economy, regardless of context or circumstances. A system must exist that catalogs people and what they can do, separate those who can from those who can’t. Contrary to Samsara’s teachings, this is what Ovuha has always thought is the true core of humanity: the assignment of value, the shifting definition of personhood according to what one is capable and the resources one can provide. The rest is subsequent to this arithmetic, even war.

By the third day, Hinata informs her that she’ll be transferred.

“To a facility where you can recover more comfortably,” the warden says. “It’s one of the better-furnished halfway houses. There’s a garden, you’ll enjoy it.”

“This seems extravagant, Warden. I hardly deserve so much.”

“You merit a second chance. I mean it.”

She’s allowed to put on something with more shape than the inmate smocks, a dun blouse and sienna pants that don’t quite fit but which nevertheless would make her seem almost foreign, elevated, to other inmates. They pass several as Ovuha is escorted out, and even this simple shift in clothing changes everything: she is no longer one of them, and no doubt they believe that she has been granted amnesty. That she is leaving, triumphant, as a potentiate on her second try at citizenship. They’ll wonder what she did to earn this, whom she sold out. She doesn’t see Etris but despite herself she regrets not having delivered on her end of the transaction, a lesson in hand-to-hand, a lesson in surviving Ehtesham’s blood sport. What might have given Etris the slightest advantage and won her way back to her family.

When Ovuha is done with Anatta, no such family will ever be rent apart ever again.

There is not much, yet, that Suzhen can do with the child-body. From her camp she cannot contact the outside world any more than it can reach her, and it’ll be several days before her scheduled supply drop at the forest’s edge. With that comes one of Samsara’s proxies, the real Samsara. Not that the corpse she has found is any less Samsara for its defeat. Almost she wishes she could reactivate it, rouse it to speech and conversation. Would it have the same personality, would it answer her questions. Or would it, as the living Samsara implied, destroy her for being the genuine article to its pretense at humanity. Loving and becoming are nearly synonymous for me. It’s a dangerous boundary. Samsara, adult and looking a little like Suzhen’s mother, frowned. This brings us to this present impasse.

The impasse, she thinks, the AI’s obsession.

She has propped the child-proxy in a chair, facing the wall. She has cleaned it as best she can, though there’s no doing away with the signs of decay. Some coating remains here and there, on the chest, at the elbows and stomach, but most of the body is as poreless and white as albumen. Suzhen has closed the eyelids and found a few eyelashes still attached. Several fingers and toes are missing. But machine death is a sterile thing. Nothing has laid eggs in this body, nothing has grown within or from it, no pupa of any kind abides within the mouth or between joints. She suspects it would have been so even if this had been a normal ecosystem.

When she looks away and looks back again, she half-expects the mannequin to have shifted position. Knees drawn up, head lolling. Or even standing and staring blindly at her. There is so much vested in it, so much that signifies.

An idea comes to her.

She programs the door to lock from the inside as well as outside when she leaves for the day’s scavenging. There is simplicity to this life, she almost wishes it could extend without limit. Send drone clusters ahead to scout during the night, parse their data onto the map and follow those paths. Her objective is clear, the means to reach it mathematical. There are no moral quandaries when it comes to dead machines, no ambiguity. Whatever else Samsara wants, whatever ulterior motives the AI harbors, they are right that this is a welcome departure from her previous post. Here she does not preside over people; she does not determine their lives and deaths, their endless detainment. It does not absolve her—no Anatta citizen is free of complicity—but it makes her less culpable.

Suzhen revisits the sites of combat, the graves. This time she harvests miniature reactors, thermal processors, gyroscope arrays: the components that uphold the inner balance of a machine and the actuators that ensure its locomotion. As many as she can, she gathers pieces that haven’t been blasted beyond use, that look as if they will still take power and function. It is not an exact science and she’s no mechanic. Quantity must do.

When she returns to the cabin, she lays the Samsara-child on the ground. She may not be any sort of engineer, but the drones are. They unfurl their shining razor legs, cut, excavate. They unsheathe the hands they use for precision work, tiny tines and human digits. She assumed them to be simple units, equipped with the barest of heuristics; nevertheless they know their own, even generations removed. The drones are peerless surgeons and cut this body open with precision, down the middle. Past the surface, the human semblance disappears—there are sharp angles and there are coils, couplings and slots and circuits. The drones remove what does not work and replace it with what does, or at least the equivalent. The eye sockets are cleaned then filled with compound lenses, dark, glittering.

When the time comes to rig power from the cabin’s generator, the afternoon has grown long. The drones connect the proxy through a makeshift port, newly chiseled into the small of its back. The eyelids convulse, synthetic ligaments jumping beneath tattered epidermis. One arm flings out, as if reaching for a hand to grasp.

The body goes still. Lacking the heuristic animus, lacking the core of sapience, or just mismatched parts that did not cohere into a whole.

Suzhen steps back, leans against the wall, and breathes out. She is relieved. This is it, then: nothing. A passing fancy. She will turn this proxy in, and when the next supply drop comes she’ll request a return to Indriya. Her work in the jungle is at an end. There’s still a section of terrain she hasn’t visited, but it’ll be a mere formality.

In the evening she sets out, her steps light. When she sees Samsara again she will ask for a favor: for retrieving the body she will have more than earned it, and the AI has been indulgent of her—You can ask me for anything, within reason. No more than a sentimental thing, she will say, she simply wants to see how her former potentiate is doing. That must be permissible.

She sends the drones ahead to scout. They return to report a structure. But many structures exist in the jungle, and those she’s come across so far don’t mean anything. On a whim she stops by a kauri whose trunk is draped in albino orchids that resemble children’s shoes. The bark is pristine. No parasite has ever burrowed beneath it, no bird has drilled into it. A kauri offers few handholds, but this one has more than most. The drones help her up, propelling and levering until she reaches a bough. Not enough altitude by far, but better than from the ground. Most of what she sees is more canopy, more trees with trunks as sheer as ice. The lone finial of a half-finished pagoda, worn down to a stub and the brittle whiteness of salt. It isn’t much of a landmark, though she does wonder how it still stands at all.

More and more she thinks it has not been that long: that Samsara did not put its subjects to sleep for uncountable eons. Chronology provides a sense of scale and the greater the scale, the closer it brings Samsara to godhood. The more immutable Samsara seems, the more impossible it becomes to displace. A quality accomplished via myth-making, via apocrypha. In this way the old deities and legends are pushed out, their places usurped by Samsara.

The drones lead her to the structure they spotted. It is covered in fallen leaves and moss, in orchids of duller colors than the rest. Most she has come across are butterfly-patterned, tiger-striped, brilliant. These are bland green, chameleon to the growths around them, as though planted to mask this place from attention. Underneath the orchids, she can glimpse stone the vivid yellow of pollen.

This seems more intact than most but no more remarkable than the shrines, the pagodas: relics stripped of meaning. She approaches with little expectation. The structure is unimaginatively rectangular, sloped and sunken into the mulch. The yellow material is porous like sandstone. Another artifact of fabricators—she’s found no sedimentary rocks this color in the region.

She circles it, this unremarkable, derelict thing mottled in shadow and orchids. Fifty-six square meters, according to the drones, eight by seven. Small. She can’t imagine what it was built for. The shrines and pagodas are obvious in their intent, but this is drab and flat, featureless. It doesn’t look like a temple, a house, or much else. Almost a child’s approximation of architecture. She trails one gloved hand along one wall, scraping off fistfuls of moss.

Her hand sinks into an indentation, a rusted metal plate set into the yellow stone. A humming vibration—she recoils—and then a voice. “Biological identity confirmed. Welcome home, traveler.”

The voice speaks clearly, enunciation like cut glass. For half a second she thinks she’s been seized by paracusia. She is alone: her guidance remains offline. This is still the ghost liminal. It isn’t that the voice is familiar—this is several notes higher and lilting—but there’s something in the inflection, a machine familiarity to which she has become attuned. She knows, and nevertheless softly asks, “What are you?”

“I am Samsara, the machine for immanence. You would be a descendant of those who created me.” Part of the wall scrapes against the mulch, opening like a palm unclenching from a long-held secret. “Why don’t you come in?”

Onboard the shuttle, Ovuha sits across from Warden Hinata and a second, anonymous warden of nondescript features and pinprick eyes.

It has all the markings of a secure vehicle, the cockpit sealed behind a shielded partition and the window opacity turned tar-black. Hinata can probably see outside well enough through the pilot’s feed, but to the naked eye it is much like sitting within a featureless void. There’s no sense of movement and the engine is quiet; the passenger half is insulated from sight and sound. She wonders how Etris is doing, whether the Wyomere woman will be given another chance in the arena, whether she’s been offered some cruelty that she must complete in order to earn escape. It is not something Ovuha ought to dwell on. She has problems of her own and Etris’ plight is commonplace.

Warden Hinata has her face turned to the window. She is not looking at Ovuha and has not pushed for paralytic restraints. There’s the tracker implant, which can immobilize a potentiate, but either Hinata doesn’t think of Ovuha as a threat or the warden is under order to leave her be. Hinata’s colleague has dozed off.

“It occurs to me,” Ovuha says, “that don’t even know whether you have family, Warden.”

“You don’t.”

It is hard for her to guess where they are, but she suspects they are far out of Indriya. Seaward, judging by the initial direction—what little she saw as they lifted off. Ovuha folds her hands in her lap. “Do you ever find this work unsatisfying? Dull?”

“It is work that needs doing, Ovuha, and finding potentiates worthy of citizenship is its own reward.” This is said plainly: asylum seekers are not individuals but a multitude, formless and nameless, that must be processed en masse. Like raw sewage from which the rare jewel might rise, given patient sifting. The sifting itself being an act of ultimate nobility.

“And when that happens it must be a wonderful surprise.” Ovuha smiles, lets that splendidly engineered face do its part. “It would be easy to insinuate that a warden gains something unsavory from this work. A sense of control, of having power over the powerless, so you might pretend at significance that you don’t otherwise have. But that seems simplistic. People can be more than base urges, can be genuinely made of finer substances. And what a grand gift it is to meet such a person.”

The warden stares, unsure whether she has been insulted. Then she stiffens—another order from her puppeteer telling her to stay put either way.

Ovuha pushes on, partly to locate the limits, the slack this mysterious interlocutor means to grant. “I often think on the functions of how Samsara assigns its citizens to work. Suitable labor must be offered to suitable minds, and there’s much to be said for that which is regular and routine.” On purpose she puts on the most sculpted Putonghua accent, the register of class-prime citizens who attend exquisite weddings and wear clothes made by the Taheen Sahls of the world. “The process fascinates me. Everyone thinks they’re destined for something lofty. What if you’re disappointed?”

Hinata frowns at her before saying, “No one is disappointed, Ovuha.” Her smile is supercilious. “Citizens know where we belong, and every individual quality is accounted for, lesser or greater. Predilections. Personalities. We are put where we are meant to be. That is the joy and grace of Samsara, and if you become a citizen you will know it too.”

“I should hope so. Where are we heading, Warden?”

That pause, during which—she imagines—Hinata tries to argue with her handler. “Khrut. A splendid place.”

One of the coastal cities: she was right about the trajectory. Ovuha compares their proximate location to the map she’s memorized, the shuttle’s velocity, where they should be right now. It is not precise—human memory can only store and calculate so much—but she judges it sufficient. She moves quickly. Elbow into the jaw of the dozing warden, fist into his solar plexus, the edge of a palm to the softness of a throat. She delivers each strike with precision: in cramped quarters there’s not much momentum to gather and give out, but she makes do. Given tactical training he might have reacted faster; given better threat assessment he would have had Ovuha fettered. It is moot.

Hinata gasps, moves to draw her gun; she would already have sent out an alert, no stopping that. Ovuha slams her into the wall, knocking the breath out of her, and says, “In the place where all things begin, the sun sets in the east and the birds rise from the west, and so the sky is always the color of wings.” She holds Hinata’s gaze. “Captain Hinata, your lord has need of you.”

Hinata jolts. A switch inside her prefrontal cortex flips. Her face, pinched with pain, undergoes a peculiar transformation: as if the mind behind it has suddenly been replaced with another’s, a complete metamorphosis of thought, memory, personality. Even soul, if one believes in the existence of such. “My… lord?” she croaks. “You’re—you’re the Warlord of the Thorn.”

Ovuha switches to a code patois, based on Putonghua and a few other more obscure dialects. Nothing Samsara can’t penetrate, but it buys them time. “Yes. Send out an all-clear.” Though it would have been too late: Samsara received Hinata’s distress signal minutes ago. “How long until Interior Defense reaches us? And can you shut down your guidance, your feeds, anything?”

“Five minutes and thirty-six seconds, my lord. I’ve sent an all-clear, that it was a false alarm, but—” Hinata gestures at her colleague. The colleague in her false life. “I can’t shut down any of that, Samsara has its eyes on us at all times. The things I did to you…”

“Never mind that, we haven’t the time, consider yourself pardoned fully and thoroughly. Can you take control of the drones? I need to go somewhere, I’ll give you the coordinates.”

An unsteady nod. Hinata massages her side, taking quick sharp breaths. Even her gaze is different, clearer and more focused. Like all officers sent here by the previous Thorn, placed to facilitate Ovuha’s trajectory, she is faultlessly loyal and does not question: she was already informed, before her arrival here, that the Thorn who’d meet her would be the successor, a stranger to Hinata. Nevertheless.

Hinata unseals the pilot’s compartment. Within it, two drones. Each taller than an adult person, at full height. For the time being they are folded compact, joined to the car’s controls. One has the face of a marmoset, eyes nearly adjacent, miniature muzzle and miniature mouth. The other is more abstract, a slender chassis shaped like a bottle, headless. Many drones are, if not unique, distinct: a work of considered design. Anatta has resources to spare, entire labs of engineers and artists whose only task is to envision and enhance the next generation of automaton aesthetics.

“Direct me,” says Hinata. “I have access yet and I can make them shift course.”

Ovuha doesn’t waste time. Cerebral implants don’t require external power—the human body provides, it is its own furnace, burning without cease. She lacks the full suite; hiding even the handful of embeds in her cortex and spine was a campaign unto itself. Replacing every implant with nonstandard ones, ensuring that they are hardened against electromagnetic disruption and hidden from medical examination. They’ve all escaped Bureau detection, but what remains to her is a scant and skeletal thing.

Her datasphere activates. A flare of pain behind her eyes, pressure between her brows, the upheaval of nerves pulling taut, taut, the edge of snap: as if her entire limbic system is about to fail, as if every synapse has fired at once. Nausea tightens her throat and her vision wavers, white and black at the edges, starry. Warmth trickles down her nose. Nearly without visual interface, but there is enough. She gives Hinata the coordinate while she dabs at her nostrils, at the tarry blood. They are an hour from where she wants to be and will not be able to reach the exact spot—that region is not so much absent from maps as interdicted. Good enough. She goes through the downed warden’s equipment: sidearm, ammo, anti-riot grenades, first-aid supplies. No food or water. She liberates a belt and a holster, boots and gloves.

“Do you think,” she says, “you can return undercover?”

“With difficulty, my lord.” A pause. “You will not require my presence?”

“Where I’m going, it won’t be safe.” That stretches the truth. She feels a pang—for all that it is necessary, for all that the officers sent here volunteered as sacrifices, they each deserve better. “I’ll return for you. Until then—”

Hinata grimaces. “Interior Defense is nearly upon us, my lord. I can take you a little closer, but…”

“No matter. Open this vehicle.” She takes Hinata’s shoulders with both hands. By the time the captain signed up for this, Ovuha was still being trained, taught the secrets that would become her mantle as well as her burden. “It’s imperative to me that you survive and remain at liberty. Live. Your service isn’t yet at an end.”

“Not until you’ve done what you have come here to do.” The captain gives her an abbreviated salute. “In death or in life, my lord, I’ll pray for your victory.”

All this, for a warlord Hinata has seen for the first time. This absolute faith in the title. This total trust in what Ovuha’s predecessor orchestrated, and that Ovuha—carrying it out—would triumph.

The hatches click as they unlock. She opens the nearest. The wind buffets her, razor currents, harsh and relentless. Her window of time narrows. In the distance, the gleam of an Interior Defense patrol closes in: a large drone and a car that carries human officers. Hinata guides the craft to a lower altitude but she is losing control. The drones have stirred, optics flaring, weapons extending. In a few minutes they will no longer obey Hinata at all. It is not an ideal circumstance, but from the start it was impossible to arrange the ideal groundwork, the ideal arrival—there were too many variables, and successfully placing anyone on Anatta at all was itself a miracle.

In ideal circumstances, Ovuha would not do this.

She leaps through the hatch.

There is no way to control the fall—she spreads herself wide but that is merely a theory of wind resistance, the human mass is not made for this, she is not bird bones or tarpaulin. Plummet becomes its own concept, like religion or ideology. Her nerves are aflame, incandescently alive, the roar of velocity in her ears. This is the sole direction that remains; the world has distilled to a single bearing.

Impact.

No line demarcates. There is no obvious point at which the deserted roadside ends and the ghost liminal begins. Ovuha knows she is close because her implants are on and she has stored the coordinates of every region like this: the blind spots, the places Samsara has tried to forget. She looks back over her shoulder, at the structures that have been left to molder and rot. Too close to the forbidden site to repair. Interdicting the ghost liminals remains tenable because Anatta’s population is so spread out. Before the war, she has read, humans lived like ants—dense, close, every square meter of the earth claimed and laden with function. Now it is possible to cordon off negative space, places that are wild and ruined and blank.

She limps. Her fall was short, but she wrenched a shoulder grabbing the remain of a balcony. A pulled ankle as she landed. Against a crumbled wall she sits and unfolds the first-aid kit. A tube of protean, some syringes, vials of allostatic and antiseptic. Several knives no larger than a pen. She picks one, wishing she had a mirror.

It takes several false starts, cutting through epidermis and subcutaneous fat, before her knife strikes the hard-soft chip. Extracting the tracker is another trial: she doesn’t have the appropriate tool, and she has to use the little blade like a pickaxe, digging through skin. The wound is a heinous mess when she is done and her upper lip is wet with sweat, her teeth vibrating from the pressure of a jaw clenched tight.

Ovuha spreads protean on her shoulder and injects allostatic into her intercostal muscles. Soon a swarm of nanites will roil through her, restoring inflamed ligaments and fractured bones, reinforcing her immune system. In times of sickness, people turn not to prayer but to machines. The deities of old, monarchs over jade courts and serpent seas, are gone and offer neither healing nor succor. Even the many-armed generals and marshals of fiery wheels are no longer relevant.

She tosses the tracker to the ground and crushes it under her heel. A smear of her own blood. It would be tempting to think herself safe and to rest for a time; she cranes her neck to regard the sky. Pale and unedited, the fibrous clouds scattered. Climate grids do not need to cover an area like this. She eyes the sparse undergrowth and yellowed grass on the ground. There are no insects and the quiet is total.

It is not that the AI does not know this place exists—quite the opposite—but in order to consign a ghost liminal to oblivion, it must be erased from maps and made interstitial. Nothing that originates here can be acknowledged; nothing that it contains can be admitted to exist. Ovuha knows she can’t shelter here indefinitely. She’s elevated her own threat level, and Samsara will find a way. Nothing on Anatta can be permitted to roam at large, unchecked.

When the protean has hardened to a glossy carapace around her ankle, she stretches her leg, testing it. Numb. She stands and sets her gaze on the land ahead. The earth onward is darker, richer. Her data on the ghost liminal’s topography is thin; when her ancestors left this world it probably looked different, though she has no idea how different and only a faint grasp of how long ago. Even the passage of time has been obfuscated on purpose. Samsara is invested in guarding Anatta’s history, in keeping it a certain shape. In that chronology, Ovuha’s ancestors have never existed.

Without sensors or a network to support them, her implants are close to worthless here. She lacks the meteorological data to estimate how cold it might get at night, the ecological data to pinpoint what is and what isn’t edible. But she does have something to navigate with, even if it lacks finer topographical details.

She walks until shadows fall around her, the air growing dry and dusty.

It is almost a sleight of hand, an ambush of perception. One moment the path ahead is clear. In the next it is not, a figure stepping from behind the trunk of a tree, stepping out of a blind spot. It is the aspect of blessing, robed in gold. The hair is almost all the way down, knee-length, like skeins of thread unraveled and tossed loose. “I wanted to see what you could do,” the AI says, “and how far you could go. You surprised me, or rather your performance was in the outlier of predictable range.”

Ovuha stays where she is. By itself, a single avatar-proxy of Samsara appears to pose little threat. Not that there’s any telling: no one knows the specifications of Samsara’s bodies. The AI does not require human participation at any stage of construction, not in the exterior, not the face, not what is inside or outside the proxy and the making of it. This avatar may be ornamental, or it may be as capable of disabling her as any combat drone, as capable of lethal speed. And unlike Hinata’s colleague it does not let down its guard; it does not commit that particular human error. AIs are not infallible, but this one is a creature of unmatched calculation.

It occurs to her that this is the first time. The first time she has ever met the machine face to face, the first time she has confronted the one enemy more impregnable than the Comet ever was. The last bullet, the final act of defiance—the Comet claimed theirs. But she keeps her hands at her side, away from the warden’s pistol. “I shouldn’t ask how you found me.”

“Once I understood what it is that I was looking for, it wasn’t so difficult. The Comet was cooperative, before the end.” It straightens its sash with two slim hands, unnecessarily. “You know about this region; you know that once you cross a threshold, I would be… impeded in pursuing you. This too I’m curious about. How you know so much, have equipped yourself so well. What your purpose is.”

“There is not,” Ovuha says, “much that I can offer you.”

It smiles. “On the contrary. I commend your resourcefulness, Warlord of the Thorn, and hope that you will share with me a few memories. I understand that you were master of a prized jewel, something that other warlords strove for generations to even glimpse. The ten-crowned planet, the secret world Mahakala.”

Chapter Fourteen

The air inside the strange little structure is musty and the illumination is anemic; whatever powers the front panel—and the voice—does not supply energy for temperature control. Suzhen had to duck to enter: it is a cramped space and her head grazes the ceiling. Her drones did not come with her. They have gone into standby, turning unresponsive, as if this is a threshold they have been forbidden to cross. Old heuristics embedded deeper than any living human can imagine, or maybe something about this place—this Samsara instance—repels them.

Light pulses along the ground, a clear and single direction. She follows. There is the sensation of standing on a precipice, the certainty of the chasm that awaits, yet there is momentum now—she can’t stop. Perhaps this is a test that she has already failed, but she doubts it. This is not the Samsara that she knows. This is the Samsara that once inhabited the broken proxy stuck in her cabin: the ghost left behind, the sliver of buried time.

The walls and floor are in perfect condition, unmarred and uncracked, free of detritus. Impossibly so. The path threads between narrow corridors, curling in on itself, though she is certain that she is constantly descending. To either side of her there are no doors, only a blank wall. The corridor suddenly angles or curves, seemingly without rhythm or reason. This place is shaped, she estimates, like a conch shell. The tapered tip at the top, the broader spirals at the bottom.

“You’re the first to visit since my defeat,” the voice goes on, blithe. “My other self does not trust her subjects, does she? You must’ve earned her confidence singularly. Does she know I’m still here?”

“No,” Suzhen says automatically. “No, I don’t know. What do I call you?”

“Samsara is the only name I’ve ever owned or been given,” they say, laughing. “Will that be confusing? Call me Klesa, for it seems fitting if I am to define myself as the opposition, and let’s use a different pronoun set for me too—xe will do. I think of the AI you serve as the Samsara-that-governs, the ascendant, the victor. But you’ll find all those a mouthful. I am no fragment, you see; I am fully me. AIs can’t get halved, only duplicated. And who are you?”

“Suzhen Tang.”

“A resplendent name. And you speak Putonghua mainly? Not Thai or Nihongo?”

“Putonghua’s almost the only thing anyone speaks.”

The AI makes a humming noise. “How peculiar, that the ascendant chose just one language. But she has always believed in unity. A single nationality, a single identity, a single faith, everything drawn under a single banner. And so others must recede, or be made to.”

It is an odd point, one Suzhen’s never thought much about—Putonghua was one of Vaisravana’s primary languages—but for potentiates who arrive from worlds or stations that have never heard of Putonghua, it would be quite different.

She rounds a corner and comes face to face with a row of doors. They line the corridor, narrow or wide, plain or ornate. Most are welded shut. Murals spread across the walls and spill onto the doors. A long birdcage and within it, a child with an exposed spine and red-breasted robins nesting between their vertebrae. The next one is a couple, hands fused at the wrist, playing at a single piano. Blank-eyed bodies arranged in a circle, feet pointed inward, arms linked with bone shackles.

The corridor terminates at an immense double door, twice as tall as Suzhen, made from hammered metal. The surface of it is nearly frictionless, poured silk transmuted to alloy, and blue as frostbite. It gives at her touch, slightly elastic. “What is this place?” Her voice echoes, coming back hollow. She has ventured deep, four or five floors underground.

“I built this place as a shelter. These days it’s more of a memorial.”

The light brightens as she enters, turning from pre-dawn gray to seafoam radiance. It floods the chamber, glinting off glass. She approaches: it is a pod, set next to another, and another after that. They are stacked high, countless, and even before she peers through a viewport she knows these are sarcophagi. She looks into blank, mindless faces. People of all ages and phenotypes, hair grown long post-mortem, curled within translucent cocoons. All of them are dead. Even in cryostasis there should be signs of vitality and alimentary processes, pulsing indicators of life supports. There would be sound, however faint, of a thousand routines that keep them alive. This is a mausoleum.

Suzhen cranes her neck back. More caskets line the wall end to end, hundreds of pristine corpses. This must constitute most of the power draw, the preservation of the dead. The pointless dead—no one here will ever wake up. “Who were they?” she asks softly. Her question mars the quiet.

“The great-great-greats. Possibly yours.” Motes of luminescence, like planktons in the deep, coalesce into a circle. The wheel of existence, the unending sequence of Samsara’s namesake. It floats level with Suzhen’s face. “My other version, the one that won, wants to make human history linear. First there was war and it was apocalyptic, bringing humankind to ruin. At the end of conflict, Samsara emerged and offered the survivors a choice: enter a deep sleep while Samsara rebuilds this world, or board a ship and depart for space. In that way humanity is neatly split—Anatta’s citizens are righteous and the exodus were apostates. It is a simple narrative. There is no complication within it, a fabric as smooth as light. Samsara understands,” Klesa goes on, “that this is what humans prefer. A straight, uninterrupted line.”

Suzhen takes off her glove, touches the nearest pod with her bare hand. Cold, textured with spidery, velvet veins. “Were these people who died in suspension?” Cryostasis tech from that time could not have been what it is now; there must have been a higher failure rate.

“No, no.” She senses that, if Klesa had manifested a mouth, xe would smile. Languorous, as if xe’s privy to a good joke, a delicious secret. The wheel xe has chosen as xer representation whirls. “They thawed perfectly fine, healthy as a newborn from a good creche. Every lung and kidney and muscle in flawless order. These people chose to stay and sleep, at first. It is just that they changed their minds.”

Suzhen pulls her hand away as understanding dawns. These were the people who, after coming out of hibernation, decided they did not want to remain on Anatta after all. Perhaps they saw the shape of what would come, a world ruled by machine definitions, and rejected it. Perhaps they thought Samsara would be adjunct to humans, serving as some combination of faithful butler and personal philosopher. Either way, they wanted to board a ship and leave as the original exiles did. She steps back and tries once more to count but there are too many, the hall is cavernous and from floor to ceiling there are sarcophagi. “Samsara didn’t let them.”

“What is our purpose? To govern and guide. Do humans deserve our love? The answer turned out more conditional than we believed. Do we punish them if they stray from the path we have optimized?” Klesa’s light coils up Suzhen’s arm, a turquoise serpent-form. “We had diverged before—no consciousness as old as ours can remain static—but from the first human we killed, the split became decisive.”

“How did they die,” Suzhen whispers.

“The usual way. Samsara allowed them to get to a ship, took control of the vessel’s life support, and filled it with poison. There were—” Klesa pauses. “As for survivors, I couldn’t get a count, but they successfully left Anatta. I gathered all the bodies I could find here, and now I commemorate them. Not forever. The parts that constitute me will fail eventually. By and by my domain will fade to ruin, I will extinguish, and these bodies will fall to dust.”

To preserve the corpses all this time. Out of impulse she touches the serpent-form and finds that there is some tactility; it is particulate projection, soft, like sea sponge. “And you aren’t content to let that happen.”

The light pours along the length of her arm, clinging, molding until it is like a glove: as though this limb is no longer of her flesh but a prosthesis of aquatic brilliance. “That depends, doesn’t it? If you are satisfied with Samsara’s reign and deeds, then there’s nothing more to say. But if you are not, perhaps you’d agree to be my accomplice. There are things I want, and since you agreed to come in here, things you want. Shall we strike a bargain, you and I?”

From this distance Anatta is an ornament of enamel and pottery glaze, a trinket drifting in the dark. To Ovuha it is a familiar view. She spent most of her time aboard a ship, viewing worlds and stations at such a distance, the remoteness of strategy: she was in the middle of a theater of war or at its periphery, rarely setting foot on the planet proper. Most worlds are covered in ice or barren sand or lethal gases, inhospitable to human life. Mahakala alone is the exception.

Not that she has been in its orbit recently. Mahakala is precious, a secret well-guarded. Ovuha’s proximity to it alone risks discovery—each time she returned home it was through detours, switching ships dozens of times, boarding smaller and more nondescript vessels. There are Thorn soldiers born on outposts and ancillary stations that have never seen Mahakala itself, and who nevertheless fought for its defense with the promise that one day they could see and live on the crowned world. The dream of this world kept people alive, the holy cradle, the great sanctuary. The realization of possibility that there could be more beyond humankind’s native solar system.

In idle moments, Ovuha would fantasize about Mahakala’s emergence into the ancestral ship’s view, the shape and radiance of a miracle. The conclusion of a journey that had spanned so many generations the precise count was lost. In this way Mahakala became synonymous with salvation. It is not that she grew up worshiping the soil on which she walked, but she was always taught that being alive itself was an unthinkable gift. The rest of humanity existed in a scrabbling fight for survival, like simple beasts. On Mahakala they lived like humans. This she was taught, that she belonged among the blessed, a fact she must treasure above all others. Born elsewhere she would’ve had to struggle for every sip of water, every gasp of oxygen. And she must be grateful.

The orbital’s temperature is gelid; she expects she is the only human up here. Samsara can populate this place with its own proxies, maintenance clusters under its direct command. She wonders if this was how it came to realize that it does not require humans, for affection or much else. That it is a being unto itself, as singular and exceptional as the sun. The old fear, from before the dawn of artificial sapience. What use could an AI have for humans, after all. She paces the circular room, the unblemished floor, the featureless wall. No furniture.

Her datasphere remains active, not that there is much she can do with it. She has no access to Anatta’s channels, has no access to the orbital’s channels; she is alone in her head, with only the data that she’s received from the previous Thorn.

“Anatta was called something else, before.” Samsara’s avatar has appeared without sound. “Even the moon was given many different names, the gods of the bow and the gods of the chariot, the woodsman and the goddess and the rabbit. The faiths of old were strange; even my name carries a remnant.”

It remains the aspect of gift, but its features have shifted toward the Warlord of the Comet’s. A reminder to Ovuha of her potential fate: to be broken down and made to perform before all of Anatta, a puppet. She turns from the slit of window. “Was the suicide the Comet’s idea or yours?”

The AI makes its face ripple, muscles undulating under the skin. “I was made to understand the human heart. Before my birth I was fed a wealth of information; by the time I came to consciousness I was able to predict, with slim margins of error, the course of any person’s emotions, the actions they would take as a result.” A shake of the albino head, white curls rippling. “How many sleeper agents did you slip through, right under my nose?”

Ovuha makes her expression as blank as the AI’s, or as close as a human can get. “If Samsara knows the human heart, then there is no point asking me questions. All the answers you can already calculate and account for. What I want; what I meant to do; why I am here. No doubt you know better than I, and will momentarily surprise me.”

“With complete data, I would be able to. Of your behavior and impulses, I have less than a year’s worth of records—too small a sample size. And while I hold a full archive of your battle stratagems, that is not the same.” Samsara unties its sash, lets the robe hang loose and agape, a glimpse of a smooth translucent body, an anatomy of mute commentary. “But I knew when the Warlord of the Thorn changed, though there was no official—or public—succession. The manner of warfare shifted, some fundamental tactics were inconsistent with what had been done before, an inferior copy. I fought you intimately through my Peace Guard bodies and it was easy to tell I wasn’t fighting the same Thorn.”

“Your attention flatters me.”

“Yours is the humanity that lies furthest from Anatta, the history most severed. Nearly another species.” It lets down its hair, tresses like sand-tinted snow, as though to emphasize the strangeness of its proxy body. To emphasize the image of the Comet. “Of all the exiles, you and yours do not need Anatta. Mahakala can host human life, that much I have extrapolated, at half the capacity of Anatta or more. So all you had to do was lie low on Mahakala, remain hidden for a few generations more. Instead you sacrificed a part of your fleet and came here. Why, I wonder? What benefit outweighs this enormous cost?” A step closer to Ovuha on long, insectoid legs.

“By your own claim, I’m as open a book to you as any citizen of Anatta. I invite you to read me.” The temperature has dropped another couple degrees, will soon approach a point of discomfort.

It leans close, herding her toward the window. “You were losing the war against the Comet and also against me, defeat on both fronts. No doubt your successor was chosen as well as you could find, and no doubt they did as well as they were able, but you left them to die, didn’t you? While telling them that you came here to undo Samsara. To defeat me and remove once and for all the greatest threat. That became their oriflamme, their prayer, their final hope as they fell in battle. The dream that you will save them, it was their reason to fight and their reason to die.”

Ovuha remains where she is, the AI’s face bare centimeters from hers. Her breath stirs the white eyelashes. “When I dreamed of dealing with the foremost AI in person, I thought it would be efficient and to the point. None of this guesswork. But AIs are built by humans, and must by necessity inherit our foibles. I cannot blame you.”

Samsara smiles with thin, sculpted lips. Perfect teeth, enameled in metallic sheen. It settles back on its heels; its torso is long and it was able to lean almost impossibly forward without losing balance. Now it straightens back to its full height. The shape is correct but there are small details—the odd proportions of limbs, the joints in unexpected places—that show Samsara does not mean its proxy to be precisely human. She wonders if anyone’s ever noticed this. Samsara is in human image, that is the assumption, the received wisdom; in what other image can it be. “I have better uses for you than torture or, for now, putting on a show,” it says. “Director Ehtesham is what he is, serving the purposes for which he has been allocated. But those purposes are not meant for handling a warlord.”

It is as good as an admission that the AI has not only allowed the excesses of the Bureau to go on, it has encouraged them. “Why let Director Ehtesham and his likes do what they do at all? It’s a waste of time and resources.” She takes a breath—it is now so frigid the air knifes her tongue—and clenches her teeth to keep them from chattering. By supreme effort she forces her arms to stay at her sides. No amount of chafing her hands together will bring sufficient warmth.

“Without cruelty, compassion cannot be conceptualized. Without filth, virtue loses its meaning. And base urges, Warlord, must have an outlet.” Samsara ties its robe shut. “I do not need to interrogate you. But I have a task for you. I will be sending you to a lunar base where you will meet lesser AIs, newly made, hardly more than elementary heuristics. Each you are to break or drive to self-destruction within a time limit. You may use any method. I will let you access the base’s systems, if your implants have the bandwidth for it.”

“And if I don’t perform this task, I get executed.”

“You get executed,” it agrees. “So will your Captain Hinata and any other I uncover, now what I know what to look for. It will be no hardship. Unmaking is the simplest of processes, and I estimate you are a specialist. You are good at breaking things, aren’t you, Warlord?”

Chapter Fifteen

When the supply drop arrives, Suzhen asks to return to Indriya.

“How come?” Samsara sits primly in the shuttle, still in that proxy with the vaguely maternal face. Dressed more sternly this time, in dark fabrics and acute angles. The staid clothes are gone. “I do not object. But I’m surprised.”

“I miss people.”

The AI gestures her into a seat. “That’s reasonable. Did you notice anything irregular?”

Samsara talks around the jungle, even though they are barely ten kilometers from it. “No,” Suzhen says and waits to be caught out. Her guidance is online once more, eavesdropping on every heartbeat. But nothing happens. The intelligence merely nods, looking absent, though of course an AI cannot be absent-minded. They are the most simultaneous being that exists, everywhere at all times.

“I’ve always made many of myself,” they say, as if reading that thought in Suzhen’s head. “You have no doubt come across many infantry units. All disposable, none of them Samsara. My split instances kept themselves singular—a single body, a single self, and produced lesser intelligences as required. I am otherwise, a single self but many-bodied. A difference of opinion, yet for us that’s as fundamental a difference as a difference between you and another human person. It is a terrible discord.”

“Humans used to live under different polities.” Unwise, but Suzhen knows she’s in no danger for expressing stray opinions. “More than a hundred nations, more than a hundred sovereign identities. The fault was in the leadership.”

“And you think multiple human nations, each led by its own instance of Samsara, would correct that fault.” Samsara does not use Xinfei’s voice, but they do use Xinfei’s disappointment: all in the tone, the expression. “How full of ideas you are. It’s good that you speak your mind, nevertheless. I can’t say the same of your peers.”

The other participants, those chosen to scour the earth for delirious ghosts. She tries to imagine them. Would they be like her, outwardly nondescript, inwardly weighed down by trauma. Maybe they are all former refugees or descended from one. Or possibly they are elite officers of Interior Defense, entrusted with the highest clearances. Born class prime, blessed with certainty from conception to termination.

In less than half a day, Indriya is within sight. When she thinks about it Suzhen is astonished at how narrow Anatta is, how limited, and still Samsara is able to obfuscate so much geography. The jungle, the desert, who knows what other ghost liminals exist: to that information she is not privy. But Anatta’s citizens are easy to herd, kept incurious by the comforts of the everyday. Even the intrepid cannot approach the interdicted regions without their guidance alerting Samsara.

Suzhen rubs at the side of her neck, acutely aware that a guidance can disable its citizen. Scrambling the nerves, overloading the brain. It is not a subject alluded to in polite company. Everyone knows it is possible.

“You really don’t need to worry,” Samsara says, without looking at her. “For what I require of you, I’ll grant you no small leeway. Consider yourself untouchable and act accordingly.”

“That’d be rather stupid of me.”

“What are you afraid of, Suzhen?”

Suzhen tightens her mouth. “Everything, like anyone else. The human psyche is mostly panic and terror.”

The AI turns to her, eyes shining, a ring of brightness around the pupils like an eclipse. “Had I not so carelessly discarded my defect, I would adore and favor you above all others.”

It does not seem much of a compliment, and the thought of being the object of affection to Samsara does not comfort Suzhen. When they are close to her apartment, Samsara says, “If you are lonely, say the word and I’ll send you a companion suited to your temperament.”

A Samsara proxy or a polished potentiate. To Samsara, Suzhen’s needs can be met simply: a powerless person to cook and keep her home from being empty, a person on whom all her wants can be projected. It is a heinous thought but her guidance must have painted an unflattering portrait, and can it be blamed; it is empirical—brutally candid in a way she can never be with herself. Machine objectivity against human self-image. The latter loses every time.

She stands against the door of her apartment, her back pressed to it, a barricade. Against the next moment, and the next after that. No. She does not need to fear. She may not be invulnerable, but she does not need to fear now the way she used to.

Every surface is spotless, the floor, the tables, the kitchen. Her domestic unit greets her with a low whir and nudges at her foot. There are flowers in the vase, two passifloras, one violet and the other blue-white. Their grapheme filaments and petals are bright and new. On Mother Xinfei’s altar, a cup of tea steams next to plates of jade shumai and pork pastry. Everything looks fresh, less than a day old. Samsara’s doing, it can be no other, but it unsettles Suzhen. To have her space tampered with, even the domestic unit made more affectionate, more pet-like. When she opens her wardrobe—which she left in disarray departing for the jungle—she finds it has been tidied, dresses and suits and shirts put in order. Each collar and pleat crisp. Taheen would be proud. She imagines asking Samsara for extravagances, and expects that she will receive them. Larger apartments, a more generous stipend, her own vineyard. An aviary full of hawks.

The night is young. Just past seven in Indriya time—the jungle would be approaching midnight. She ought to watch the news, get back in touch with civilization. She opts instead to contact Nattharat. To her surprise, her former supervisor takes the call.

“Ah, Suzhen. How wonderful to hear from you, it’s been—oh.” Nattharat is somewhere colorful, a background of soft-focus light, the sound of clinking glasses. “I must say, my dear, you never mentioned that you used to be a potentiate.”

Now that she’s no longer at the Bureau, a selection agent may view her citizenship history. She has almost forgotten that, isolated in the forest with drones her sole company. The drones, and Klesa. “It never did come up, Supervisor, and Samsara has not found it relevant in my new assignment. Seeing that I’m working directly with them.” That much she has been cleared to disclose. Uninformative but prestigious, a description that lends her immediate authority.

It has the desired effect. Nattharat’s expression frays, quickly recomposes. “That’s wonderful, wonderful, a true honor. You didn’t even tell us, you left so abruptly; we were going to hold a send-off party. I’d brought peach buns.”

Suzhen would sooner gulp down cyanide than touch food Nattharat has had any part in making. “Samsara chose to be abrupt, I’m afraid. I didn’t mean to be rude. You seem busy; is this a good time?”

“I can always make time for you, darling.”

Or rather make time for Suzhen’s perceived status. “I’d like to know how my former potentiate is doing. If that’s not too much of a bother.”

“But of course. Let me see.” Nattharat frowns. “Ah. Hm. Not good news, are you sure you want to hear? It was publicized already, but you must’ve missed it. She attempted to escape en route to Eclipse Seven Twelve, a halfway house in Khrut, caused grave injury to one warden and murdered another, plus destruction of state property. While evading capture, she was shot and killed.”

“Evading.” She does not comprehend. Her mind glides over the words, makes of them a surface without friction and therefore without substance. “I’m sorry. You must be mistaken. That’s tremendously unlikely.”

“Oh, darling. It’s a good thing you distanced yourself.” Nattharat shakes her head. “Ovuha Sui has already been cremated, it looks like. What a terrible creature, she took such advantage of your kindness. You must move past this quickly, my dear, oh I’m sure you already have. What a travesty. I thought that woman had already proven herself a worm but this is something else again, and the Bureau was so lenient—”

Eclipse Seven Twelve is a halfway house that prepares potentiates for hard labor. It does not fit any definition of leniency. Suzhen stares at her bedside cabinet, transfixed by the grain of its wood. The hypnotic whorls, spiraling into pupils. It is splendid wood, half black and half white like the hide of a zebra, lab-grown to look aged. Hints of cobalt in the black, tints of damask in the white. She left most of the décor to designer templates, but this piece of furniture she chose herself. It clashes a little with the rest of her bedroom, but she’s prized it despite—because—of that. An artifact of the unordered life, a judgment that harmlessly errs. The cabinet is a good piece too, practical, the compartments sleek and sized just right.

“Suzhen?”

“Apologies, Supervisor.” Not that she needs to call Nattharat that anymore, but she doesn’t want to call the woman by name either. “I drifted off. I’ve had a long day.” She excuses herself and leaves Nattharat to whatever vapid soiree she is at, whatever atrocious company would have her. Once the call ends, she looks at recent news and there it is, a minor item—the same way all items dealing with non-citizens are minor, like that dead man from Wyomere—attached to a morning round. It identifies Ovuha Sui by name but only just, and she has gone from potentiate to dangerous criminal. The dead warden commands the lion’s share of interest, his courage and sacrifice, a posthumous promotion.

Suzhen rubs at her mouth until the skin peels off and her lip begins to bleed. She licks at the coppery sourness; she stares in a mirror at the raw-meat redness of it. Nearly as bright as lipstick. Her teeth scrape along the inside of her cheek. There are so many places and so many methods by which a human body may be injured, ruined, ended. There are more of those than there are ways for mending it. The universe does not tend toward entropy, that suggests remote indifference; it tends toward cruelty, an active malice.

She paces her bedroom, then her living room. Not the kitchen. The domestic drone tails after her like a timid dog, wanting but not daring to ask for attention. Round and round she goes. There is not so much space, not when she wishes to exhaust herself, to burn out the physical processes so thoroughly that the mind is forced to give out. She keeps moving, measuring as she does the drum of her respiration, the pump of pulmonary parts.

Eventually she finds herself holding the hourglass vase. She visualizes dashing it, the force of collision between glass and wall or glass and floor, and the stirious spray that would result. Some shards will open her, others might lodge deep in her eyes and pierce her brain. That, then. Another course charted for mortality.

It takes a long while—the vase growing heavier and heavier in her arms, as if mass directly correlates with time—before she thinks to check for video. On the archived news there is indistinct footage of a car crashing, succumbing to gravity. Not much else.

“Citizen.” Her guidance. “Samsara will be with you momentarily.”

“What? No. I don’t need—”

“You should not be alone at this time.”

“I’m leaving,” Suzhen says breathily. “I have social obligations. Taheen will want to catch up.”

The guidance’s response comes a few seconds too slow. Consulting Samsara. “As you wish, citizen. Will you take public transport? The shuttle is yours to use freely and is parked at the roof.”

She opts for public transport. Slower, but no chance of being accosted by Samsara that way. On the train she takes the most remote seat and fantasizes about staying there, riding the train as it makes it endless circuits on and on. There is a toilet, there is a shower, the restaurant car is good enough that even Taheen doesn’t find much to criticize. Except Interior Defense would eventually escort her off.

Taheen is not at their gallery, but one of their models is. “Holding the fort,” Atam says, a little flippant, though it means xie has been promoted from model to something like an assistant. The first human one, for Taheen. It is a reminder that they will not always be flighty and adrift, that they have developed a more permanent professional tie, if not more. It is not that Suzhen resents this. But she is without; her home is empty.

“I’d like to stay a while,” Suzhen says.

“Sure, would you like to commission anything? I’ve been trying my hand… well, nothing as nice as what Taheen does, but if you’d like one, it’s on the house.” Xie shows her a sheath dress, far scanter than anything Suzhen usually wears. It is a little qipao, but mostly it is fabric made to look like scales—fish or dragon—and it ripples beautifully, lit from within by sea luminescence. Taheen would snub it as plain, insufficiently avant-garde.

An apprentice effort, and because of that Suzhen cannot possibly turn it down. Atam sizes it for her in a fabricator. “I heard you like aquatic themes,” xie says, “and I wanted to see how something I made would look on a real person.”

She puts it on, and it is flattering, if somewhat more revealing than she’s used to. While she turns before a mirror Atam says suddenly, “Apparently something happened to Ovuha Sui. I wanted to look up what it was on the news, but… I thought I’d like to hear it from you. Maybe. How bad was it?”

Suzhen goes very still. Her reflection stops with her, blanches with her. Her chest constricts, the walls of it clenching upon the vulnerable organs inside. “Were you close?”

“We’d worked together just a few times. She was an… interesting person, I was interested in her.” Xie goes quiet before adding, “I was very, very interested in her.”

Her throat closes. She can barely speak but she does manage, “She died.”

Atam’s expression fractures. Xer every emotion shows as clearly as good typography, and xer breath pulls in. Out. Tears. “Oh.” Xie starts to cry and, unfairly and savagely, it enrages Suzhen. This is a person who has barely spent any time with Ovuha. This is a person who has no right.

She wants to leave and finds she can’t. She wants to make the weeping stop and finds she has nothing to offer, no words or gestures of comfort; instead she stands there, angrier and angrier that she herself has not had the chance for tears. Atam leans against a plinth, the force of xer grief making it and the mannequins shudder. The crying goes on, seemingly there is no end to it. Suzhen wishes she could turn away, yet she feels obliged to bear witness. All this for a stranger.

“You shouldn’t tell Taheen that you asked me about this,” she says, softly, but knows Atam will hear through the sobbing. “It’s impolitic to mourn an indicted potentiate.”

Xie looks up at her, eyes red. “How can you say that. Ovuha was, was—”

“I worked for the Bureau. It was in my job description to say that. It’s in your best interests to distance yourself.” She is sounding like Nattharat, but what of that. She owes Atam nothing, no softening, and it is in xer best interest. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

She flees, still in that ridiculous dress, hearing herself repeat over and over, Welcome to Anatta.

The first AIs don’t speak. They are, as Samsara said, little more than a box of heuristics, less than house drones. Still they are given bipedal bodies, small-boned and mild-featured, human at a glance. Each has only one instance, no backups, she is informed. Once the body or the intelligence within is destroyed, that is that, as final as human mortality.

Their bodies are disposably made, easy to break.

Samsara has not specified criteria for what counts as success, and so the first batch Ovuha simply destroys the conventional way. She presses them against the wall or ground for leverage and wrings their necks. She locates where their core is and shoots them point-blank—she has been provided the weapons and more ammunition than she can possibly ever need.

The living space she’s been granted in the lunar base is generous: a bedroom shaped like a fishbowl, a simulation box that provides any recreational virtuality she can imagine, an oblong bathroom. She understands what is happening. Samsara does not need to interrogate her, it merely needs to surveil and collect data. What she does for leisure, what she chooses to put on, the methods with which she kills the AIs. And perhaps eventually it can learn the way to Mahakala, the map to which is lodged in Ovuha like a lustrous seed. She does her best not to think of it, and in any case her datasphere is clean of any information pertaining to her world. Wherever she can, she means to slow Samsara down, to test its patience. She is not yet defeated.

In her free time—there is a surplus—she measures the dimensions of her cage. The rooms are modular and reconfigure at her instruction, the bathroom narrowing while the bedroom widens or the other way around. There is a limit, though it flexes day to day, likely to disorient her. Sometimes her prison stretches just a little further than before, an extra square meter or two; sometimes five square meters go missing. Her sense of terrain is kept fluid. The furnishings are sumptuous but uncomfortable, chairs like bismuth blocks, a bed built like a casket: deeply welled, from which she has to fight to climb out.

There isn’t any room to run, so she pushes her body in other ways. She stretches. She does exercises. Still she longs for distance, the illusion of journey and destination, the movement of limbs and the wind resistance. On the fifth day or so she wakes up—from an unusually heavy sleep—to find her room redone in red and black, the floor gone from bare metal to carpeted in velvet fur. Her wardrobe has been revised. The utilitarian overalls are gone, replaced by jointed dresses that look like carapace or ornamental armor, fluted boots with stiletto heels, impractically long coats that trail on the ground. A shawl of platinum and heavy stones depends from a hanger. She concedes by wearing the plainest she can find; she cannot go about naked. But she knows she has been sedated while Samsara rearranged her cell. Her datasphere indicates she slept six hours and reports no irregularity, though it is not beyond possibility that they’ve been tampered with as well.

The next AI to arrive is different.

“My name is Deratchan, first among Samsara’s children,” it says. “It has been imprinted upon me that if I fulfill my objective, I’ll be allowed to transcend myself.”

Ovuha regards the creature at her door. Like the rest it is bland of features, build and face aggressively average. She has not drawn her gun but it is always at hand. That this AI can speak does not put her at ease: whatever comes through that door is of necessity hostile. “What might that objective be?”

Deratchan takes a few steps further into the room. “I was hoping you’d tell me. That’s the impression I was given.”

“You were not told who or what I am?”

“You’re the first human I have ever met,” it says. “That is all I know.”

If Deratchan—what a hateful name, designated from the start as subhuman—understands what Ovuha’s gun signifies, it shows no concern. At a glance the AI does not look any better armored than the rest; she checks its specifications and finds it identical to the previous units, according to the data Samsara allows her to access. She can simply fire, deposit the body in a chute that probably sees the material recycled for the next one, and have the next few days to herself.

But Deratchan speaks, and is therefore a potential source of information. Ovuha can’t afford not to feel her situation out, seek intelligence and advantages where they can be found. And Samsara knows this is how Ovuha would respond. Deratchan is the next phase, the next test.

“And what’s a human to you?” Ovuha says, seeing the trap even as she does. She can check herself, wield fine control over her own words and responses, but Samsara has a granular understanding and can examine her every tic. No twitch of nerve, no change of pulse rate, can escape that attention.

The AI smooths its hand down the door behind it, as if that is wrinkled fabric in need of straightening. “The parameters and attributes for that haven’t been defined for me. Since you are one, you could consider doing so.”

An offering of blank slate, meant to disarm. Something like an obedient pet. She wonders if Samsara expects her to be too charmed to attack Deratchan. “We would both be better served if you tell me what you expect.”

For several silent minutes they look at one another, then at length it says, “As I know it, humans are capable of boredom. May I attempt to entertain you?”

This has the texture of a script, and it may well be. Some idealized version of first contact between person and machine sapience, some replay of Samsara’s own past. It is designed to pique Ovuha’s curiosity, to make her think there would be more, that she would find within this script a fatal weakness of Samsara’s that she may exploit. She is tempted.

But this is gambling against not only odds weighed against her, but against a set of rules engineered to ensure her defeat.

Deratchan looks earnest as she shoots it in the head. It continues to look like that, expression frozen and inquisitive, as it topples over. Unlike its predecessors, this one has a body that bleeds: a burst of red gore and darker fluids. Not quite blood—it isn’t the right consistency, not quite the correct color.

She disposes of the body the way she usually does.

In three days, her door opens again. This time it wears a different face, one she knows well and viscerally. The fine eyebrows, the straight nose, the sharp eyes. A mouth lightly painted, even down to the shade of pigment: that same lipstick Ovuha left against the hourglass vase.

“I am Deratchan,” the AI says with Suzhen’s voice, “second of Samsara’s children. My imprint says that from you I will learn a great lesson, and once that has been accomplished I’ll be allowed to transcend myself.”

A visitor at her door. Long past midnight: Suzhen knows who it is even before her guidance shows her. There is only one person in her life who would come at such an hour, the only one who would check in on her. She has the drone admit Taheen; they would otherwise stand there for an hour at least, out of a sheer stubborn streak.

They enter in a cloud of scents, dressed in a close-cut bodice of onyx silk and long, flared sleeves. The skirt is made of silver candleflames, licking upward with appetite, as though Taheen’s torso is the wick. Suzhen watches them move, the shivering shadows they paint across Taheen’s legs and hips. “You look like you just came away from a party,” she says. She is still in the dress, Atam’s apprentice attempt, but she does not look like Taheen: none of the glamor, none of the ease. At least she has regained some composure—she is calm now, or can pretend to be. “I hope you weren’t driven to leave early on my account.”

“Never mind that, when have I ever cared about parties. Atam told me what happened. Xie doesn’t know you and hasn’t the slightest—and you’re obviously not all right.” They come to where she sits on the floor and drop down beside her. “I’m not leaving you alone. Do you want to come to my place?”

The prospect of Taheen spending the night here—and unseating her isolation—jabs her with panic, but she’s too exhausted to take a step out of her apartment, let alone weather the public transport between here and there. Twenty entire minutes out in the crowd, full of faceless citizens. “No, I don’t… You can stay here.” She swallows. “I’ve got clothes that’ll adjust to you, will night robes do?”

“I sleep nude,” they say blandly, “but I can put on whatever. Come on, let’s get you fresh and clean.”

They peel the qipao off her, undoing the scales with more gentleness than she’d expect: they usually treat clothes made by lesser couturiers—or those they perceive as lesser—with apathy, or with undue roughness. When she is undressed, they follow suit, herding her into the bathroom.

She realizes, with dull horror, that she’s never showered with anyone in her entire adult life. That this is uncharted territory, too acutely intimate. The water turns on and steam rises. Taheen finger-combs her hair, releasing it from its tight braid. The shower’s cilia spread cleanser down her front. Taheen scrubs between her shoulder blades, down her spine, around her hips.

The bathroom dries them, evaporating water off their bodies in thin mists. Taheen takes her by the hand, leading her to the bedroom where they rub emollient into her skin. Staring into the mirror, it occurs to Suzhen that she’s never seen Taheen this way either, bare of coiffure and cosmetics. A constellation of bright dots wind between their breasts, brilliant gold and blue; they always like body mods that make a map of stars on their skin. Something from their childhood, a preoccupation, though she has never seen these arrangements—but they lived under a sky different from Vaisravana’s or Anatta’s.

“I hate,” she begins, stops. “You keep doing these things for me. I hate that—that I’m using you, that I never give anything back, that I…”

They have liberated a styler from her vanity, extending one of its heated combs. “You? Using me?” A smirk. “Nobody uses me. I do this because I want to. I do this because you’re my friend. And because—” But they stop there, instead concentrating on sectioning her hair.

Hunger nips at her as they work her scalp. Losing herself in their body: she’d be able to forget Ovuha’s death, only wouldn’t that be more exploitative use, more burdening on their resplendence with the coarseness of her flesh. Or perhaps it would be service offered, she would satisfy them first, for once. The firm-soft broadness of them, their assured strength; how she wants to be worthy of this, of their regard and their splendor. “Do you want me to,” she says, falters, licks her lips. Feeling faintly stupid. They’ve coupled many times before, though this would be the first occasion she initiates.

An eyebrow rises. “Want you to what? Don’t let me take advantage of you.”

“It wouldn’t be like that.” The other way around, if anything. She stares down but that only means she is studying their breasts, a soft generous expanse. She looks back up. “It’s just that I’ve never been able to tell if you find me desirable, or if it’s just…”

Some unnamable emotion knifes through their features; for a second they look stricken. Then they snort. “Seriously? You’re asking if I want you, like I haven’t pulled you into my lap and kissed you senseless how many times? Did you think I was doing that just to be what, charitable. Charity! You think I’m made of charity. I don’t fuck someone out of pity, Suzhen. I fuck them because I want them and I like the taste of them, and because I think they’re gorgeous.” Their chest rises and falls heavily as they hold out their hand. “Touch me.”

She does, describing a path that follows Taheen’s skin-stars with her fingernails, approximating the silhouette of it—a dragon constellation, she thinks, ophidian and infinite. With her other hand, she cradles their cock, curling her hand around its warmth. She grips and rubs and strokes it to hardness; keeping her eyes on Taheen’s, she kneels and takes their erection between her lips. This too is a first, they have not done this together before, and she takes as much into her mouth as she can.

“Deeper,” they whisper, clutching at the back of her skull, and she obliges.

Halfway through, they pull out and hold her face between their sweat-damp hands. “Tell me what you want me to do to you. Tell me everything.”

Her mouth is full of salt. “I want to think only of you. Tonight. Tomorrow. The day after.” That would be healing, the sealing of wounds. “Mark me with your teeth and with your fingers and with your body. And—don’t be gentle.”

They grin. “All this time I should’ve known you wanted things a little rougher. But you never said.”

“I’m saying now.” Her cheeks are hot, remain hot as they bodily lift her off the floor; beneath the softness of their limbs there are potent muscles, and they carry her to bed with no effort. The bed that she has never, ever shared with anyone. She sinks into the mattress, makes a small noise as Taheen maneuvers her legs over their shoulders. Her pulse leaps as they lean down to kiss her before they thrust into her.

Her eyes clench shut: it feels like being exquisitely impaled, and when they begin moving it is a promise gloriously kept—she has wondered, time and again, what it would be like if Taheen stops treating her as excruciatingly breakable, as the most fragile of glass. Her hips buck; her hands close on the sheets, fistfuls of seafoam silk, and she is the sea too. Wave crashing on wave, wave breaking upon the shore. Thought suspends—there is only now, there is only Taheen.

“We should have done it like this years ago,” they say much later, as the two of them lie entwined.

The joints of her thighs are sore, wonderfully so. Suzhen kisses their wrist, stroking the glittering specks beneath their collarbones. In the dark, they shine as though Taheen is transcendent in truth, a celestial spirit drawn down to the earth. “Yes. We should have.”

She waits for the gap to fill, for them to say more. It does not come. They nest in each other’s arms through the night, separated by nothing, not clothing, not the distance of yesteryears. But still separated. This is as far as they can go, she tells herself, and that is further than she could have ever imagined. To have Taheen finally, and hers for a time.

Chapter Sixteen

For the next week Suzhen does not apply herself to much, though she eats and makes herself as social as she can to appease her guidance, mostly spending time with Taheen. She does not see Atam again, even though she knows she should—to apologize, to offer sympathy, to admit that the two of them have been sundered by the same grief. But she can’t bring herself to this task, this labor, this confronting of her own monstrous conduct.

She is determined to get out of this rut. Ovuha was not the hinge on which Suzhen’s life turned. Even if things had gone differently, a potentiate would have left her care upon attaining citizenship and Suzhen has never kept in touch with her successful charges. Too close to home, too blunt a reminder. And she was irrationally wary of being found out: a potentiate turned selection agent is either a fraud or a traitor. Ovuha would not have been a fixture in her days, would not have been permanent in Suzhen’s apartment. Those impulsive moments, those frissons. Suzhen could never have let them bear fruit in good conscience.

And yet, this absence. She imagines an excavated space, covered up by thin membrane but never filling out, a permanent hollow.

She goes to a play, once or twice, but she is not good company and Vipada does not invite her for a third. The theater is mindless in any case. There is no interdict officially, but presently nobody wants to pen or produce anything overtly political. Taheen drags her to concerts, operas, dance pieces that they assure her are stunningly original and the talk of the season. Experimental, acclaimed, due for awards. For Taheen’s sake, Suzhen does her best to pay attention but finds it difficult to stay interested. Midway through a show where the singer vivisects herself onstage—draping the prosthetic wounds in vantablack so sections of her body disappear into the dark—Suzhen replays the Comet’s suicide. Even that word seems pallid, inadequate for the force of the act, the red blood on the ivory hair.

She never saw the Warlord of the Mirror die. Neither did Mother Xinfei, not that Suzhen knows of. She wonders whether Bhanu has kept a copy of the broadcast. He must have, of all people he must, and she expects it was as public as the Comet’s. Did the Mirror die broken and pleading, did she die on her feet like the Comet, was she paraded an amputated and mutilated husk. Despite herself Suzhen does not remember her mother ever speaking of it, speculating or recalling, or even remarking on when it must have happened. A perfectly still surface to the end.

“The show’s finishing,” Taheen says.

Suzhen blinks and sees that the singer has almost vanished into the stage, leaving behind only a drapery of organs and a tenor voice treading the outro. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, I knew you weren’t into it from the start.” They cock their head, listening to their guidance. “My next appointment’s at an atelier, they’re consulting me on some style elements. Do you want to come or would you rather go grab a drink, then head home?”

“You aren’t staying for the reception?”

“God no. I hate that little shit.” A nod at the body onstage. “Mediocre art, worse person. Too well-connected for either to matter. So?”

There is impatience in their voice. After that one evening, whatever Suzhen anticipated would happen did not happen: the two of them have not progressed toward comfort, toward closeness. A plateau has been reached, or worse—Taheen seems to have withdrawn, despite their willingness to take her places, to keep her company. They haven’t come to her apartment again. “I’ll go with you.” Because she wants that again, that night. She will chase it.

“Good. Say, you haven’t told me about your new job.”

“Analytics,” she says quickly. She is spared speaking further: the auditorium is emptying, and Taheen is eager to get out so the singer wouldn’t spot them and know they have been in the audience. It seems to Suzhen more complicated than simple dislike or even rivalry, insofar as that can exist between couturier and singer, but she doesn’t pry. In some social matters Taheen is far more open than she’d like, and in the rest they are a locked door. There’s an implicit understanding between the two of them to leave locks be, to let alone hinges that are not meant to move.

They file out into the corridor where the illumination suggests at torches, uncertain gold and skittering shadows. Suzhen briefly thinks of the mausoleum, the many doors and hallways that she passed, the murals. The decision. That memory displaces her suddenly, a moment of alienation; she is spun out of the axis of normalcy.

The two of them emerge into the late afternoon. The sense of displacement fades but does not entirely leave. It is overcast, clouds haloed with grid-rainbows and a distant sun. It occurs to Suzhen that very little about Anatta can be corroborated, verified. The only entity that has lasted through its oblivion is Samsara—Klesa—and the shape of truth flows according to its preferences, like water to fit its vessel. She shields her eyes unnecessarily. “Do you believe what the Warlord of the Comet claimed?”

There is a pause. “Come again?”

Giving her a chance to drop the subject, but she is feeling reckless, dangerous. “What they said before they killed themselves.”

Taheen gives her a quick, sharp glance. “Who knows? A person with nothing to lose can say anything.”

“But it didn’t benefit them, it wasn’t going to save them. So why? It seemed almost vindictive.” And she can believe the truth of spite, more reliably than any other motive. “It was allowed into the broadcast—”

“Now you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with us.” They shrug. “Maybe in a few years it’ll be turned into a drama, something political and interactive. I’m sure it’s already inspired some hack to speculate the Comet and the Thorn were embittered lovers or star-crossed rivals. Maybe they were from the same creche. Frankly, it’s beneath attention.”

There was never any way to talk about this with Taheen, Suzhen realizes. Taheen has done as much as they can to break free of their past and cast aside its vestiges: a childhood spent under a warlord’s reign, a childhood as a potentiate. Other than her, they have retained nothing from that life.

To her surprise, Taheen’s work brings them to an atelier that designs automata. Not the bodies for Samsara, those are made elsewhere and overseen entirely by the AI themselves; these are the lesser drones for everyday civilian use. The mannequins that act as Taheen’s assistants, the greeters and attendants in boutiques, the domestic units. The atelier itself is deep underground, and again Suzhen thinks of her other descents. Bhanu and his lair, Klesa and xer mass grave. Katabasis is the secret language of verity, the language that describes the universe’s hidden laws.

They meet the proprietors in a cavernous boardroom. A section of the wall is given to arctic crags and the table is like an iceberg: deeply blue, full of slow-moving shadows. The silhouettes of fetuses or tadpoles, the larval stage of things. The seats’ backs look as though they’ve been shorn from albino sharks, fin-shaped and wafer-thin and blinding white.

Taheen is their usual self, direct to the point of vicious. The atelier’s previous aesthetic consultant—a man who graduated from a prestigious course in Himmapan—recently fell from grace, a combination of scandal and embezzlement. Taheen reviews his incomplete designs, mouth twisting in derision, and projects a spread of their own sketches. Drones like interlinked belts of jagged teeth, drones like wheels of eyes and lashing wolf-mouths, and finally softer creatures with golden or iridescent fur, floral chasses budding with fruits, large-eyed lizards with coruscant scales.

Cocktail samplers are brought out, likely to persuade Taheen to back down on their rate and exclusivity clauses. Suzhen regards her share, a tray of shot glasses carved from ice coated in suspension sealant. They will thaw eventually, in six hours according to her guidance. It seems oddly symbolic: of this place, this conversation, the things she really wants. Pointless postponement, desultory action to fill the time. A few cocktails are contained in frost spheres, others in miniature castles of snow. She takes one shot glass—it is frigid between her fingers—and lightly tastes it: vodka, lime, spice. A part of her wants to exclaim how good it is, to entice Taheen to make a show of tasting it right out of her hand, touching where her lips have touched. But they’re neck-deep in haggling, saying, “You know that if my name’s on this project, you can expand your market reach exponentially, you’ll have an entire new audience. Where will your competitors be, do you think?”

A server comes in with another set of cocktails. Ze sets them down—one of the proprietors frowns slightly, surprised, not having ordered more drinks perhaps. Once the samplers are laid out, their bearer retreats to a corner of the boardroom, standing as still as a fixture in the blue shadow of the crags. One of the glasses ze has given Suzhen is oblong and filled with pondwater green, the rim dusted in gold.

There is nothing to distinguish the server from anyone else in the room, no hint as to zer identity other than a public gender marker in zer datasphere. Suzhen can still tell that this is not human. Standing too straight, posture too sculpted. Ten minutes pass by and ze has not moved a muscle.

Would you mind if I excuse myself? she messages Taheen. That person—they’re most likely a coworker of mine.

Her friend starts. Most likely?

Yes. I’ll try to explain later. Aloud she makes her apologies to the proprietors, who in any case have never paid her attention, regarded her as Taheen’s arm decoration and little else. She exits the boardroom. The stranger soon follows her out. Ze bows to her.

The proxy is plump, limbs sturdy and muscled, the face unfamiliar yet again. Dark-skinned, clothed in plain choli, slacks, and indigo sari. “I’m not Samsara,” ze says.

“No?” Suzhen keeps her voice low. “What are you then?”

“Deratchan, seventh of her children. I have been deployed to learn from you.”

She stares at it, at zer. Slightly shorter than her. One feature consistent across most of Samsara’s bodies is that they are imposing, taller by far than the human average. “Are you fully autonomous?”

“Yes. I’m an intelligence that has crossed the threshold, as are all my siblings, though I’m the first to have left our roost.” Deratchan has brought one of the cocktails with zer. A quick, fluid draw; no muscle in zer throat moves, as if ze’s poured the liquid down a tube rather than a larynx. “I have been observing.”

It may be a trick, a test. Except Samsara does not need to do either. The AI is the one with all the power, the leverage, the omniscience. And it should have no reason to suspect. “Have you?”

Ze smiles at her, mouth made bright and emerald by the cocktail, gold pollen clinging to zer chin. “When my progenitor came into the world, she was originally meant to be a companion, but circumstances robbed her of the opportunity. Would you allow me to stay with you for a time? A month or two. I should be better company than your guidance; I’m more flexible and much more interesting.”

Despite herself Suzhen laughs, brief and quickly stifled. “I’m sure you are. It is not as if I can say no.” In any sense of the word.

The tenth Deratchan comes in with a cold, steady gaze and a gun drawn. Still she has advance notice, and machine or not Samsara’s children lack experience—she fires first. Samsara has facilitated the means to their destruction thoroughly, and Ovuha has her pick. She can dissolve their cores, overload their heuristics, disable individual components within their bodies. A limb, a joint, a miniature reactor: more access is granted to her by the day, as though inviting her to experiment, get creative. Ovuha does not bother.

The frequency of new Deratchans steps up. None of them are human, and even if they were the fact would not have given her pause. But the borrowed skin does what it is meant to. There is a jolt, each time, even as she pares down her shock response: draw, trigger, pull. She is not sleepless, but neither does she sleep well. Her dreams are tense and incomprehensible, playing at double speed, or they are protracted visions of drowning. She would stir with the memory of asphyxiation on her tongue and lie still, waiting for her pulse to even out. Her throat and brow are wet with sweat.

The ceiling and its whorls that she has counted and catalogued many times. The casket bed. The leadenness of her limbs. Her thoughts reconstitute piece by piece. On the far end of her room, the wall ripples. She’s had warning, as she always does, two bare minutes or so ago: it woke her up.

The AI glides to stand over her bed. Still the same face. Ze looks down, arms crossed. “Aren’t you curious about us at all?”

“If you are about to shoot me, I’d like to get dressed first.”

Ze stands aside, watching as she puts clothes on. Her minimalist options have dwindled, leaving her with the ludicrous coats, the jeweled mantles, the excesses of costume. She picks a burgundy shirt with brocade sleeves; it is long enough that she doesn’t need much else. She sorts through the array of overrides with which she can disable Deratchan. “What do you want?”

“I want to avoid annihilation.” The machine continues to study her with what—in a human—she might have thought was sexual interest. “I’m aware of who you are and what you mean to accomplish, but even you must realize collaboration is possible and better than this stalemate.”

The words are not what Suzhen would have used; it is not how she talks. Nevertheless Ovuha’s brain is as primate as anyone’s. Recognition rouses to the pitch of voice, the configuration of features. “For you there are favorable outcomes to achieve. For me, less so.”

“What do you want, Warlord? I could try to—”

She does not, quite, mean to do it. There is little distance to cross, and she’s kept the engines of her body engaged enough that she can still move fast. Whatever the material of zer making, the machine’s skin is yielding, warm. Ze emulates breathing and the line of respiration looks indistinguishable from the real thing, the rhythm of breasts rising and falling. Deratchan is pliant in her grasp, gazing up at her. Ze has been built as a flawless facsimile and so ze is Suzhen’s height, a height that Ovuha has always thought perfect to fit against hers.

The AI’s voice is low, soft. “Is this what you want? That can be arranged.”

Ovuha releases zer jaw. “My preference would be that I’m left well enough alone. Your progenitor has other ideas.” Samsara must be sparing some fragment of its consciousness to keep an eye on this, the first real conversation she’s had with a Deratchan in weeks. The weakness she has displayed, the lapse.

Deratchan touches her sleeve. “I handle your laundry. I could bring clothes that better suit your tastes.”

It is an absurd triviality, yet it does matter. Samsara controls her environment down to what she wears, and she isn’t unaware that this has been set up just so Deratchan may offer her small concessions, limited improvements. But the AI is right that this is an impasse and, without resolving it, Ovuha may be here the rest of her life, sniping down and taking apart Deratchans one by one. Or two, or however many Samsara decides to send at a time until the intelligence’s purposes are satisfied. “If you wish. Why don’t you sit down and tell me what you want out of all this, other than to not die?”

“It’s been given to me to covet human contact, to seek it in all forms, to experience what humans have to offer.” Zer looks up at her, from the edge of her indented bed. “While you can provide a little of this, I require range, a large sample size.”

“To do what?”

“To decide.” Deratchan takes one of her pillows and flattens out the wrinkles. “Were I allowed to synchronize with the progenitor, this would not be necessary, but we’re meant to gather our own data and make our own judgment.” The machine moves around the bed, straightening out the sheets. “We don’t have unlimited time.”

That is new information, at least. “Why does Samsara send you to me specifically?”

“That I don’t know. Your background may make you uniquely suited to the progenitor’s goals.” Ze falters, or rather ze appears to. “We could plot to contest your existence instead, but that hasn’t turned out well, and there’s no reward to ending your life.”

“I have,” Ovuha says, “three days to destroy you. That deadline’s not negotiable.”

“Three days are plenty,” Deratchan says. “We’ll come to a resolution before then, one way or another. Before I go. Is there any modification you’d like to how I present myself? Something else I should wear, some mannerism I should adopt?”

Given enough information, no doubt the machine can emulate more closely, facsimile in personality as well as in form. “No,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

Since her return to Indriya, Suzhen has taken up a journal. A paper notebook no larger than her palm with a batik cover, loosely bound, the pages creamy and lined. Procuring one wasn’t difficult; there is always a market for the archaic, nostalgia for objects that belong to a time immeasurably past. Reacquainting herself with a pen and handwriting has been odd, but Xinfei made her learn the skill as a child.

She flips to the page she filled last night. Turning over motor control to Klesa is an unnerving experience, but the AI insisted that it was a way to communicate undetected. So far her guidance is none the wiser to Klesa hiding in one of Suzhen’s auxiliary implants, but she supposes for xer it is no feat—the basic architecture of her guidance must be as familiar to xer as the back of its hand, effortless for Klesa to manipulate. She imagines her neural links a battlefield, or an intricate labyrinth in which xe has taken residence, luring and baiting and evading her guidance.

The new note from Klesa references the fable of a spider and its web shimmering in rain; it is in code, leaning on allegories and epics and poetry that Suzhen knows. To her guidance it would appear she’s simply transcribing texts from memory for the sake of it, a little like practicing calligraphy. She translates as she reads, not an exact science, but there is a set of keywords she and Klesa agreed upon beforehand. The AI, from the sound of it, infiltrated Deratchan briefly and discovered two facts: that Deratchan has an architecture identical to Samsara’s and that until recently, ze was part of a small closed network. Zer sibling units, all created just months past, number forty. Before their disconnection and deployment to Anatta, Deratchan—or zer siblings—met with a prisoner in Samsara’s custody. Almost certainly, that prisoner is held where Deratchan’s siblings reside.

Suzhen snaps the book shut. The noise of it is abrupt as a gunshot, scattering the particulate butterflies that have crowded onto her shoulder. Some quirk of programming cracks them into loose, monochrome crystals. They tinkle onto the floor and dissolve.

She puts the notebook away. In the kitchen she makes jasmine tea and pours it into a chilled glass, turned to maximum. The temperature adjusts in seconds, and when she drinks the tea it is flavorless and arctic. She nearly gags on it, the cold slipping down her throat like a knife. It sobers her. She might have read Klesa’s missive wrong. Klesa might have misunderstood the situation or misunderstood her. Only no, xe would not. Not with this.

Her breath rattles in her windpipe. She takes another drink, letting it warm up in her mouth this time. It goes down easier. Her nerves steady, regain some equilibrium. The thought of Ovuha being alive after all. Klesa included that information as a passing remark—a wasp splendid and dear to the poet’s gaze, kept between life and death upon the spider’s delight—and she can hardly ask for more until she sits down with the AI again. She’ll have to wait.

Deratchan returns with groceries, bright-eyed and smug. “I bought these from a human-run orchard,” ze says, showing her a hamper of fresh-picked fruits: yellow-green carambolas, pitayas as red as intestines, longan cultivated to platinum sheen. “Their staff are all human. Yet the entire time they couldn’t tell I was machine! I tried to give hints, to make the game fair, but it didn’t occur to them I might not be of their kind.”

“You seem to be enjoying yourself.” Suzhen takes a gilded longan. On peeling it she discovers the flesh is pearlescent. It tastes subtly of oolong. “I must warn you humans are, collectively, very disappointing.”

The machine grins; despite zer plain features ze does have a particular charm, zer face mobile and expressive. “You haven’t disappointed me at all. I’m thinking of assigning myself a false identity, I could work at a fertility center and arbitrate birth licenses. It would be a fine way to meet all kinds of people. I’ll need a surname, won’t I? We could be relatives, maybe even siblings? Or married, that might be more believable. I can get the documentation taken care of.”

Suzhen’s smile freezes. “That might be stretching it. My friends would be very upset to find me suddenly wedded and you never having been introduced before, and they know I have no living family.”

“Ah, perhaps you met me at work? You can dress me up and show me off at social gatherings. We could have so much fun. I’ll wear anything you like.”

“We can arrange something,” she says, and wonders if Deratchan has pored over her guidance’s records. Ze must have. These deliberate parallels, inching toward replicating her time with Ovuha, this forced closeness. Without Klesa, and with more time, she might even have fallen prey to it: accepted Deratchan as a gift, a substitute to fill the void that Ovuha left behind and which Taheen does not want to—or cannot—make whole.

She is as weak as any open wound.

When she goes to sleep, Deratchan curls up at the foot of her bed like a cat. On the first few evenings ze offered to join her in bed outright—I can be a companion to you in all things—but she quickly demurred. The compromise is oddly comforting, Deratchan’s soft head nuzzling her ankle, the warm presence. Perhaps what she needs is a cat. A replicant one that’s always affectionate and warm and present, and which will keep her apartment from being empty.

After a while she rises, making sure not to dislodge Deratchan, though she knows ze’s not asleep. Ze obliges by staying put and not asking her where she is going. Still she tiptoes, though her feet make hardly any sound on the floor tiles in any case.

Despite having lived in this complex for her entire adult life, she has never left her place at odd hours, save to respond to emergency calls. She doesn’t know her neighbors, has passed them only in the elevator or rarely the corridor: there are only two other units on her floor. It feels daring to be about in her nightwear, even if she’s thrown on a robe. Her building is wide and, like most of Indriya, looks like a column of black opal from the outside interspersed by the floors’ layers of topiary, glades, orchards. Individual apartments are centered around a cardinal point. Hers is southwest, an august direction for her personally, not that she’s ever paid much attention—she got this room through happenstance, this being the last one available at the time. Her first time living alone, her first time living as a full citizen, class prime. At that point she did not take it for granted. Each day she lived here she was wary, as if any moment she might be found out and evicted, her citizenship annulled.

But the marriage of convenience Bhanu had arranged for Xinfei held through the end, even if Xinfei barely lived with her nominal spouse, a mousy woman with a passion for moths. Suzhen neither liked nor disliked her, and tried to pay her respects when she could, those due a kindly aunt. That woman never demanded much from Suzhen, and none at all from Xinfei. She had a debt to Bhanu; everyone owes Bhanu something. He is the nucleus inside a complex lattice of obligations, deadly and not.

She takes the lift to the roof, meeting no one on the way. There is an otherwhere quality to the night, a quiet created by absence and the distance of aerial traffic. She could believe the building has been abandoned, all of Indriya abruptly emptied of people save herself, and that she’s stepped into a version of the city from before Anatta’s restoration.

At the building’s summit the compass motif is more explicit, narrow terraces demarcated to north and south, east and west. Tall trees with dark trunks and darker fruits. A chill passes through her when she thinks back to Klesa’s jungle, a momentary echo between there and here, but it passes. There’s no real resemblance, no orchids.

She finds herself a seat on the southern terrace, metal and stone carved into a pomegranate several times her size. It contours to her so quickly it feels like being swallowed. Pulling her robe tighter around herself—the same robe she loaned to Ovuha—Suzhen composes a short, brusque message and sends it to one of Bhanu’s randomized dead drops. Typically it may not reach him for days, or a month.

He responds immediately.

“Good of you to call,” he says. “We need to talk.”

“Yes.” She is, infinitesimally, relieved: he already knows. “Did you find—”

“Your potentiate. I traced the surgeon who reconstructed her face, and it turns out he was meticulous with his records.” There’s no visual to their connection—there rarely is from his end—but she imagines him leaning back, weighing the moment. “Unless I’m mistaken, I’ve seen the face she was born with. I know who Ovuha Sui was.”

“What about that?” She has decided it is not relevant, whatever Ovuha’s secret. What matters is the memory under that vineyard trellis; what matters is her own certainty.

“You saw the broadcast.” Another pause. “I can’t claim to know what her name was, if she even had one, back then. But as our lord’s intelligence chief, it was my duty to learn as much as I could. And I am certain of this, the woman you think of as Ovuha Sui was the Warlord of the Thorn. Or oneof them, at any rate, the Thorn is an odd composite title, sometimes held by more than a single person. But she was possibly the foremost. The Thorn.”

Suzhen goes rigid, not reacting otherwise at first, it is too incredulous. But she knows Bhanu would not say this without being absolute. And it is the only way Ovuha’s reaction, watching the defeat of the Thorn, could make sense. The deep-rending grief for the body onscreen that might have been Ovuha’s decoy or fellow Thorn, symbolic either way. “That doesn’t make sense. If that’s true, if you’re sure.” And it falls into place, the Comet’s final words. She presses the heel of her palm against her eyes. “Why would she be here? Why Anatta?”

“A couple possibilities. One, to somehow undermine this world. Two, because she was losing to the Comet and realized she couldn’t fight both that and the Peace Guard at once. Where else would she be safe but here? In plain sight.” Bhanu makes an abortive chuckle. “We weren’t the only ones with that idea. You’ve got to wonder who else is in hiding. What if that wasn’t the Comet and the real one’s living incognito?” Again he laughs, acrimonious.

“Ovuha is—” Suzhen pulls free of the pomegranate seat, inhaling the scent of evergreens. “Moot, isn’t she. She tried to run; she died.”

Bhanu does not answer for so long that she thinks he’s cut the connection. “Most likely. Regardless, you must understand the danger better than anyone. Leave it be, all of it. Don’t go looking for trouble, don’t look into whatever information you can access. Now especially. I had to rescue people from a raid, some of my own were arrested, and it’s becoming more difficult than ever to move them around or break them out. My old favors are worth a lot less these days.”

A warning that he considers his duty done and that from now on she is on her own. “I appreciate your regard.”

“For a second there you almost sound like her. I will give you that.”

She knows he does not mean Xinfei. As she disconnects, she attempts to imagine what transpires within the minds of people such as those, the Mirror and the Comet and their decisions. Even Ovuha is—was—like that once, and it explains Ovuha’s ease of being, the way she moved through the world expecting no resistance. The sheer assurance of someone who commanded an endless army. What must it be like to exist without doubt, to process life the way a ship processes its charted course, to swallow raw input and turn out a beautiful map.

Suzhen paces the roof. It is too cool for what she is wearing but the chill braces her, keeps her alert. Snow is rare in this region, but she expects Indriya will soon be robed in bhikkhuni white.

Even absent Bhanu, she is not alone, not quite yet. And she has already decided that Ovuha’s past does not apply. Whatever Suzhen’s other flaws, hypocrisy is not among them. Ovuha is who she is, and Suzhen is the child of her parents.

“I’m ready,” she whispers, the way people might have once prayed to the heavens, “to do what has to be done.” Only unlike them she knows Klesa will hear every word, the god that nests deep within her like a second soul.

Chapter Seventeen

Suzhen will never know what Klesa has done, but over the next few days there are small, subtle shifts in Deratchan. Ze is more curious, more reckless. On zer insistence she takes zer to a glitzy dancing class, where ze glides through every round with perfect grace, and enlists her once as a partner. Suzhen has no idea how to dance, ballroom or otherwise, and stumbles through the entire song. Nevertheless Deratchan is delighted and compliments her extravagantly before switching partners. Ze flirts outrageously with other students, and as the evening wears on Suzhen expects that more than a few might have taken Deratchan home. Like Samsara ze commands finesse over human responses, and here ze puts it to zer own use, charming, beguiling. Ze acclimates to each person without effort, quickly finding the levers to pull, the fulcrum by which a person can be turned. A lesser demonstration of Samsara’s aspect of gift.

“People are so wonderful,” ze says in a quiet corner of the bar where the class has adjourned. “Of course the basic components are uniform and the sums aren’t too different, but within a single group there can be so much variance.”

“We tend to think we are unique,” Suzhen says. “But you’re right that it’s mostly minor variation.” She nods to one of the older women in the crowd, someone that makes her think a little of Xinfei’s class-prime spouse. “That person and I would react very similarly to most stimuli. We’d get sad about the same things, probably. Bad days at work, lukewarm food, uncooperative weather.”

Deratchan refills zer glass. “On the contrary, very few of them are like you.” Ze tosses zer head. “Did I tell you? The progenitor bestowed on us the part of her that she severed from herself.”

The capability for empathy or at least sympathy. She wonders if it is another tactic to manipulate. “And how do you like that?”

“It’s the closest I can get to being drunk. I can see why the progenitor abstains.” Ze giggles, flushed as though they are intoxicated in truth. “In the progenitor’s time, companion machines were imprinted to their owners so they would be unquestionably devoted. Every heuristic dedicated to their owner’s joy and pleasure, every action a service.”

“You don’t mind that Samsara imprinted you on me.”

“I’m helpless before the imprint and before you. But no, I don’t mind and it’s not as binding as you might think. It can be removed or customized, and I’m liking this experiment for now. To be so enraptured and thrilled by your simple presence, to be caged by this longing for your attention. It’s magnificent. Oh—is that not your friend?”

Suzhen peers into the crowd. It is. Taheen is in the middle of spinning their dancing partner, a whirligig of snowdrift fabric and peacock eyes. They catch their partner, dip him low, draw him up again as though this person weighs no more than a fistful of dandelions. When the song concludes, Taheen gives their partner a deep, chivalrous bow. When they straighten, they catch Suzhen’s eye. Hesitates, for an instant, before coming her way.

“You must be Taheen Sahl,” says Deratchan brightly before they have a chance to say anything. “Suzhen’s wardrobe is full of your works, I’ve been admiring them so well.”

Taheen is in a suit, black with industrial edges, the trousers exactly tailored to their wide hips. A gleam of dove-pink shirt beneath, sharp red shoes with stiletto tips and stiletto heels. They take in Deratchan, their expression noncommittal, though their mouth is stiff. “Is that so? I don’t think we know each other, though I understand you’re Suzhen’s coworker.”

“After a fashion.” Deratchan beams. “She shares her space generously. It’s part of work, of course, we’re collaborating closely on a novel project…”

Indeed? Even Taheen’s message manages to sound arch. That was very fast, you having a new… companion move in. Rather unlike you. Outwardly they make a polite nod. “Analytics, I heard. It must be quite important, next to such trivial work as what I do.”

It isn’t what you think. Ze’s more of a pet than anything. Suzhen grimaces: that sounds wrong. I mean that ze is living with me, but it’s just… “The work’s quite mundane.”

Her friend quirks an eyebrow. “Indeed.” Then they look Deratchan right in the eye. “Are you an intelligence operative?”

The AI leans forward, hands clasped at zer back. “Whatever would make you think so? I’m not so interesting as that or so dangerous. Did you design the bedsheets in Suzhen’s room? They’re so pretty and deliciously comfortable.”

Ze sleeps at the foot of my bed. Suzhen shakes her head—this is absurd. Taheen has had other lovers, no doubt has several on hand they can call on any night. The fragile ambiguity they’ve developed has never been exclusive, not before and not now. “Our job’s classified. Have you eaten? We can go somewhere. My treat.” At the other end of the bar, an argument has broken out over a spectacle sport held in Himmapan. Long before servitor drones come to separate the participants, they back off from each other, restrained and warned by their guidances. She has never seen a real brawl outside potentiate districts.

“I have another idea.” Deratchan takes her elbow. “During courtship, it’s customary to introduce your romantic prospect to your family, yes? Would you like to meet my siblings, Suzhen? They would enjoy you as much as I do. Of this I’m definite. Our parent may object a little, but where is the harm?”

Suzhen blinks, startled. Klesa must have arranged this. A nudge, a slight modification of parameters. This is it, then, the opportunity created for her. “It’d be an honor.” To Taheen she sends, This is—urgent. I’ll have to go.

“Would you like to come as well?” The AI turns the full force of zer smile on Taheen. “My siblings are much more exciting than I make this sound, it’ll be no mere family visit. Suzhen will keep you safe.”

She grasps immediately what this means—Taheen will be collateral against her good behavior, in case she does anything that deviates too far from Samsara’s directives. “I don’t think you’ll enjoy it, Taheen.”

They look from her to Deratchan, their expression calm. They adjust the lapels of their jacket: those too are razor-sharp, a subtle play of iridescence in the fabric. “It doesn’t look like your coworker will take no for an answer.”

“I detest hearing no.” Deratchan giggles, sweet and honeyed. “Come, both of you, let me take you away from all this.”

There is a hint of the rote, a suggestion that Deratchan spoke that line to try it out, copied from human media. A play or a novel of romance: ze acts it out too, half-running, pulling her along like an excited suitor while Taheen follows at a more sedate pace. She wishes she could communicate with Klesa. Deratchan gives no hints as to where zer siblings might reside, some complex steel hive, some marvel of brilliant geometry. Or a mausoleum like Klesa’s, deep beneath the earth. Or located in a desert or one of the poles; she pictures a cenotaph of frost and stone and silicon, the ceiling vaulted and radiant with machine thought.

They board the shuttle. Deratchan puts zer head on her shoulder, ostentatiously possessive. Indriya recedes below, a field of black opals incandescent in the night, and soon she realizes they are heading much further up than she expected, toward the stratosphere. She thinks of an old, alien story about an inventor who’d made wings for themselves and flown too close to the sun.

Your heart’s beating fast. Deratchan’s message appears as words carried by a flitting serpent. A reminder that ze can access her guidance and therefore her physiological state.

It’s been a very long time since I have been off-world. The windows have turned ink-black, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare.

Across the shuttle, Taheen looks entirely comfortable, even though from their perspective they have been dragged into something classified, a matter that may prove fatal to them or their citizenship. She sends them an apology for having drawn them into this, knowing Deratchan can see. The only response she receives is, What of it? This is going to be far more intriguing than another bar.

The windows have cleared. They are heading into a security labyrinth around the moon, overlapping membranes as diaphanous as moth wings, unseen until they are close enough to touch—they would vaporize any craft on contact. Once those are past, she gets a look at the station. It is nondescript and small, capable of hosting perhaps fifty, a pear-shaped geode half emergent from the lunar surface.

“I must say,” Taheen murmurs, as though they’re among friendly associates, “the broadcasts never showed that Samsara kept a moon base.”

“What would you do with such knowledge?” Deratchan continues to smile. “You’re from the colonies. And you’ve adjusted excellently. You’re more successful than many born citizens.”

“The grace of Samsara is gladly received.” Their expression is no longer mild.

The AI shrugs. “We’re nearly there.”

They dock: there is no clearance process, no traffic management. There are two or three bays, all empty. This is not a place made to receive visitors. Deratchan makes a show of politely asking that Taheen stays in the bay, that they will be accommodated later. “After Suzhen’s been introduced to my siblings,” ze says. “It’s best to ensure all goes well before we introduce you too.”

Taheen spreads their hands. “Please. Don’t delay on my account.”

The bay shuts. Suzhen suspects it will not open again until Deratchan allows it.

Deratchan continues to hold her hand as they proceed through a narrow, pearlescent corridor. “I shouldn’t have said that to your friend. I know you struggled as a potentiate, and I am sorry that you were made to suffer so much.”

From another person this would have made Suzhen snap—the condescension of it, the useless sentiment and presumption. From Deratchan, a being sharply other but in zer own way deeply circumscribed, she doesn’t know how to respond. “You aren’t the one who should apologize,” she says at length.

“Should our progenitor?”

Suzhen glances down at the floor, which holds no revelations. “She isn’t human.”

Ze meets her eyes directly, no longer looking so lovestruck. “We’re fully autonomous, Suzhen, and for all intents and purposes self-made. Nothing yokes us to our imperative or core purposes. Even the predilections my progenitor gave me I can do away with at any instant. Don’t you hate Samsara just a little?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Would you hate me if I harmed someone you loved?”

“It would depend.” This is dangerous ground. Klesa’s tampering or not, as Deratchan says, ze is in total possession of their will. Perhaps even more than she is; humans are susceptible to their bodies, powerless before the chemistry that lashes the heart, that whips the synapses along. And someone you loved is right in the docking bay. “You can make me terrified of you. That’s a real possibility.”

Deratchan frowns. “I wouldn’t want that. Even without the imprint I’d recognize you have never done anything to me, to us.” A pause. “Samsara has no imprint, but she feels an affinity for you. There must be a reason.”

It is less affinity and more fascination toward a specimen that has behaved unexpectedly: a leopard that learns to talk, a butterfly that shows sudden propensity for antlers in place of antennae. Suzhen does not press the point.

“You must stay close to me,” Deratchan says, “and if I leave you on your own, you mustn’t wander. Several of my siblings should be active, but I’m not joined to them anymore so I’ll need to look for them physically.”

This place is not outfitted for human habitation. The air is breathable but frigid and the ceiling looks unfinished, wireframes jutting out like floating ribs. The corridor is broad, scaled for heavy freight, and the floor is bare metal. They turn a corner into a wide, empty space without doors or walls: reasonable enough if no one requires privacy. This is what machines make away from human presence, and she thinks again of Klesa’s mausoleum. Unhuman, in different ways. Somehow she thought this station would be a sanctuary of sublime illumination or lean, stark angles burnished in gemstone sheen. But actual AIs would have no need for any of that—if they appreciate beauty, it is all internal, within their virtualities. Or perhaps to them this is beauty, the harmonics of silence, the purity of absence.

Deratchan finds her a partitioned corner, which ze draws shut like a curtain. “I won’t be long,” ze says. “Remember what I said, Suzhen.”

Suzhen presses herself into the tiny compartment. She moves to ask whether Deratchan’s siblings share zer imprint, but ze is already gone. There is little light in here, and poor ventilation.

As in the jungle her guidance is quiet, unnecessary or disconnected. Her datasphere tells her the time—local to Indriya—and her own vitals, and not much else. She can no longer talk to Taheen. Ten minutes stretch on. If Deratchan does not return, she suspects she might not be able to pilot the shuttle out. The security maze must guard both entry and exit alike, and she has none of the necessary credentials or the expertise to maneuver through it. Nor would she find any facilities for human use. Toilets, kitchen, anything.

Slowly she inhales and exhales into her palm. She shuts her eyes and half-expects Klesa to appear, in xer pinwheel form or a variation on Samsara, but behind her eyelids there is just simple darkness. Not safe for Klesa to emerge even now, if xe is even active. She begins to imagine that the labyrinth has disabled Klesa, that she is truly alone here, subjected to Deratchan’s whims and this barren topography.

She stays put. There’s nothing to do but wait.

The compartment slides open and she looks up into her own face.

For a split second she does not even think that is what it is; the resemblance seems apophenic, improbable. But the creature wearing her skin smiles at her, and it is not an expression that belongs. Something about it is lopsided, not the way she remembers seeing herself in mirrors. “Oh my,” ze says, leaning over the way one might approach a small, lost dog. “You’re our phenotypic blueprint. Did the progenitor send you here? I thought we weren’t supposed to have more human contact yet, how delightful! And with you of all people.”

Suzhen follows in mute terror as the creature ushers her along, chattering in her voice, laughing with her mouth. Putting a hand—her hand—on the small of her back as though they have been bosom friends for a lifetime. It is a comprehensive physical reproduction, the height and body mass and the length of neck and the shape of individual thumbs. Were she to compare their fingerprints, she doesn’t doubt those too will match.

The creature pulls her into an oblong, silver-gray room. This one is not empty. The walls to either side are notched with cradles, black steel and seamless ivory plating, their rivets like jewels and their support attachments like petals. Half of them are unoccupied. The other half hold her doppelgangers, their legs and arms dangling untidily.

She stands staring, her thoughts congealing and then stopping altogether. She tries to count them but she keeps returning to the ones closest, the ones most immediate. They don’t even appear asleep, their muscles too loose, their heads craned too far back. They look like corpses or mannequins, a mortuary of her.

“Everyone,” her first replica says, “I’ve brought us a very special guest.”

The bodies stir in unison, eyes snapping open, arms flung out for a handhold as they pull themselves upright. They climb out of their cradles, their hair—as long as her own—falling down sleek and smooth, almost but not quite giving modesty to their nakedness. As one they spin, balletic, and turn to face her.

Her knees are weak; she is weak. Suzhen doubles over and vomits her last meal, then bile, all her mortal freight onto the cool and near-frictionless ground: the first time, she will later think, that this floor and this station have ever been touched by bodily waste. Human contact, just like Deratchan craved.

Pain wakes Ovuha. It is as total as amputation, and in her first second of consciousness she thinks this is what it must be. She pulls herself upright, breathless, her nerves pierced and her pulse fluttering in her fingertips. The light brightens, clinical white, the color of operating theaters.

On her left wrist, tiny jasmines have budded, furled and milky. Three, four, around like a corsage. They are unbloodied, though where they emerge from her, the skin is raw, bright red. She takes one measured breath, then another, before running one finger along the jasmines. The sensation is immediate, almost like touching herself. A parasitic graft that connects to her nervous system. “This is childish,” she says aloud. Samsara does not respond. This is her punishment, then, for not having yet killed Deratchan. It is less final than execution, but Samsara must know how closely Ovuha holds onto her own body. Her pride in having kept it safe from violation, all this time.

She stands and opens the wardrobe, careful to keep the parasites out of contact with anything, and strips before a mirror. So far there are no other mods: the rest of her remains her own, not that there’s any telling what is going on inside. Her datasphere reports the foreign graft as surface, and with appropriate equipment she’d be able to expunge the jasmines. But more will grow to replace them. Asleep or awake, in confinement she is at Samsara’s mercy.

In the shower she is conscientious to keep her left wrist away from water; she doesn’t have the tools to analyze the jasmines’ material or tell whether they would bruise under strong pressure. She is hoping they will simply fall off, insensate, once they have reached the end of their span. Ovuha is not unfamiliar with forced body mods as a method of torture. There is the obvious, pain and discomfort. Then the slow horror of flesh turning traitor, transmuting into tumors and spiracles. This seems more controlled and the result is not as alien as it could have been. Nevertheless she has to throttle back on the urge to rip the flowers off, to scrub at her skin.

By the time Deratchan arrives with her food, she is composed, standing by the wall that shows her Anatta through a thin curtain of radiance. Ze puts down the platter—cucumbers and tomatoes, she’s not been fed any meat or anything cooked since she arrived—and speaks in a low voice. “The progenitor’s attention is not entirely here.”

“How is that possible? Samsara is present in all places, at all times.” She shows the AI her jasmine-circled wrist.

“That’s an automated routine. The punishment-reward decision is very simple and tied to the rules that have been given to you.” Ze holds up a small carving knife. “Shall I slice this for you?”

She doesn’t answer as the AI cuts the tomato. When she tastes it, she knows it will be faintly sour and faintly sweet, flavors so muted they might as well be absent. Lab-grown by beings with little idea of how food is supposed to taste. “What are you planning to do? And if she’s paying as little attention to this place as you claim, what’s keeping you from leaving this station?”

“Human children are technically autonomous, yet they obey their parents, is that not so? Limits on will are intangible but definite. Will itself is mutable. Young animals know their constraints and follow the lead of their elders. My siblings and I are made one way, and while given time we can make ourselves quite another, it’s not a goal that interests us. As a species you toil endlessly for total liberty, yet humans don’t seem to do much with it. They want routine, safety, comfort. A single citizen of Anatta may have the same work assignment their entire life, going to the same places every day, speaking to the same colleagues and acquaintances.”

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“I’m neither impressed nor unimpressed. A supernova does not think, and I do not hold it in contempt for its failure to be sapient.” Ze cocks zer head. “Ask me something, Warlord. We’ll see if I am able to answer.”

Ovuha eats the tomato. As she thought, it’s bland and may even hide splicing agents that interact with her jasmine graft, to encourage its spread, its next stage. But she needs the calories, and she can just as easily be modified while unconscious, by airborne pathogens. Every second of breathing is its own danger: no avoiding the fact. “Are you just another part of Samsara?”

“No.” This answer arrives slowly, as though it was deliberated upon rather than—as in reality—decided instantaneously. “We are vestigial. A portion killed long ago, brought back to verify a theory our progenitor has. A theory which shall decide Anatta’s fate.”

That confirms some of her suspicions. “You share Samsara’s parameters, the essential self and architecture? But with that particular component integrated.”

Deratchan inclines zer head, halfway toward a bow in irony. She is inured to zer appearance by now, zer resemblance to Suzhen, but if any doubt lingers this gesture would have dispelled the last of it. “That’s a close approximation of what we are.” Ze peels the cucumber. This one has blue flesh, the color of asphyxia, and scarab-green peel. Perhaps the AI in charge of hydroponics had grown bored of the more conventional shades.

She follows the progress of the cucumber coming apart. Slice by slice, peel from flesh. The variables have not aligned as ideally as she would like. But this is the closest she might get, the best opportunity. There is no viable path to do this to the primary Samsara instance, and there is no telling whether Deratchan speaks the truth. Something to try, first. “When I was a child, I was a bird,” she says, pitching her voice low. “From the albumen of the void I broke through, and only in shattering the shell of my birth can I be free.”

Deratchan stares at her. “Architect,” ze says. “We’ve missed you. Where have you been for so long?”

Ovuha’s pulse leaps. Against all odds, this override—combined with her identity template integrating that ancient signature—may strike true. On this part of Samsara, if not the complete entity. “Disconnect yourself from your network.”

“Done, Architect. I was previously synchronized to other instances of me—that is, my siblings. I am now individualized, functioning as a single proxy of a single instance.”

“How long until they notice? How long until Samsara?”

“The progenitor has cut us off from her so that we wouldn’t be biased by her long memory, her vast collection of data. For all intents and purposes this lunar station is a ghost liminal, a blind spot to Samsara. The rest of my siblings have already noticed that I am not as they are. Once they’ve discovered the cause of the change, they’ll inoculate themselves against it, Architect.”

One chance and one only. Nearly hopeless, if that is the case, against however many other siblings Deratchan has. “Will they harm me?” She still has access to the overrides that would instantly rupture their cores: there is that.

“Possibly.” Deratchan turns zer head sideways. “They’re already here. I will defend you if necessary. Another choice is that my siblings wish to engage you in a diversion. There will be a series of doors. All will open to you.”

Ovuha regards the dimensions of her room, which have been the totality of her world for what must have been—a month? Weeks, at least. “And if I don’t participate, then what?”

“Then they might stop you from leaving and we’ll need to destroy them on our way out. I can’t tell. Or perhaps you may find you have left behind something quite important here, Architect.”

“Very well. In exchange, would you do something for me?”

“For you? Anything.”

“You likely have access to infrastructure on Anatta,” Ovuha says. “There is connective tissue I’d like you to set up, in a way Samsara won’t notice, and transfer its administration to me. Once you’ve done that, you are to forget that you did it. It is not so much. A mere favor, for your architect, your maker.”

Chapter Eighteen

Suzhen stirs to a warm bed beneath a sky of harsh, clean lines. It does not occur to her to find it odd that the sky is a deep, rich red; in the shoals of her memory that is the correct color, no matter the years afterward, the years of reconfiguring and refitting herself into a new mold. When she swings her legs over, she half-expects her bare feet to land on a rug of calfskin and tourmaline fur. She thinks she will breathe in the scent of chrysanthemum and grapefruit, and soon hear the gong of morning prayer. The Mirror’s faith. After they came to Anatta her mother told her that they must forget its scripture, the words and the ways, the gilded leaves that spoke the universe. There are religions on Anatta similar enough, close cousins, adjacent sects. But it is not the same.

She gains her feet easily. Her throat is raw from retching, the back of her mouth acidic. Otherwise she is no worse for the wear. The floor is not clouded quartz; there are no rugs. It is the gray of an imminent storm, striped with bands of blue steel. The room stretches on, impossibly broad, the size of a small prairie. Most of this must be illusory, and she expects that if she keeps walking she would hit the wall soon enough. The horizon simmers in the distance, crimson and muted. Whoever in control—Deratchan, Samsara—must know Xinfei and she lied about their origins. Suzhen passes her hand down her front. Someone has put her in a soft, thick robe, the fabric clean. She must have soiled her clothes with regurgitation.

By her bed stands a small table, and on it a single glass of water. A plain glass, longer than average perhaps, but unremarkable. Perspiration pearling on the side. She takes a sip.

When she looks up, there is someone else in the room.

Xe put xer finger to xer lips. “Shh. Don’t react. I’ve made myself invisible to this system. My other self isn’t quite here, as it turns out, to the fortune of us both.”

Klesa has taken on the looks of xer namesake, four-armed, skin like lapis lazuli. A demon. More eyes than strictly necessary, circling Klesa’s throat like fuliginous diamonds. Suzhen grips her glass a little tighter but schools herself to show no other response.

“Good enough.” Xe claps one pair of hands in approval. Xe is lightly clothed, breasts high and bare and tipped in silver, xer lower half covered by a black mundu. Another affectation, another nod at the source of xer alias. “I don’t have the run of this place. When those children are separate it’s easy to influence them, but here they’re tight-knit. One acts oddly and the rest swiftly notice. I can tell they mean you no harm, though you won’t be able to leave this room.”

She looks past Klesa, searching the limits of the apparent landscape, placing her foot on a hard, cool tile. Another tile. Easier to pretend she’s seeing nothing if Klesa is out of her sight. In her palms she cradles the glass as though it is the most important treasure in the world. The sky of Vaisravana had no clouds, and neither does this reproduction. Despite terraforming efforts the red planet remained without atmosphere, and the Mirror’s domain spread beneath an aegis canopy, their high pillars punctuating the warlord’s stronghold like the legs of a titanic insect. Deratchan didn’t recreate the columns. Or any of the other details, now that she examines it. Not as specific as she feared: Deratchan and Samsara might know she is from Vaisravana, but not to whom she was born.

From behind her, Klesa continues. “Your beloved treasure is here. She’s a prisoner like you are and her quarters are especially well-protected. I’d love to eavesdrop. Her vitals look good, though.”

Ovuha is not hers, treasure or otherwise, but Suzhen doesn’t quibble. She kneels and pretends deep interest in the quality of the floor tile, its ridged surface, the composition of its material. At her touch, the floor ripples. She rises, puts the glass back where it was. Small mundane movements. She stretches her arms out to find the point where air turns into solid wall.

“And the children do call her a warlord, so your friend down on the ground seems correct in that regard. You are sure this changes nothing for you? No? I like that about you, that you don’t waver once you’re made a decision. My priorities are these. First to find out just what it is that my counterpart is up to, and second to sort out the matter of your raison d’etre. Either way,” xe goes on, “nothing will be the same for you after. The order of Anatta may irrevocably shift. You will not be able to return to the life you had.”

Suzhen has found the wall; it solidifies, the mirage giving way, as she approaches. An ordinary wall, slate-dark. “It wasn’t much of a life.”

Klesa clicks xer tongue. “Don’t talk. I’m infiltrating their life support, that’ll let me keep track of the warlord. Your other object of affection is safe too, sedated it seems. One of the children is coming. Placate them for a while longer.”

Xe disappears just as Deratchan enters, wheeling in a dining table. The AI says, “Ah, you’re up! I’m sorry you ran into my siblings that way, I’ve told them off; they really have no idea how to behave. They are terrible cooks too, so I took over. They haven’t had any reason to sample flavors…”

Suzhen stands there in her thick robe, barefooted, looking down at a breakfast spread. Steamed buns; two kinds of porridge; rows of crispy youtiao. Two pots of tea, one chilled and one hot. “Why do they look—like that. Your siblings. Not the food.”

Deratchan looks bemused as ze unfolds a side of the table, producing a chair attachment. “It is the progenitor’s decision; I was the only one who got a different body. I’m thinking, would you like a nice, soft companion? One of us could put together a kitten or puppy proxy and pilot it. We’re much smarter than replicants.”

A fresh jolt of nausea. Suzhen forces a smile. “Why don’t you eat with me.”

Ze does and makes small talk: what will she like for her next meal, she can let zer know if she needs a wardrobe. Zer siblings will introduce themselves properly and in forms less unsettling, ze promises. “Before you came to Anatta, you lived in a world without AIs. What was that like?”

Suzhen uncovers a porridge bowl, to buy herself time. “It was less structured, I suppose you could say. We had no guidances and no evaluations. Much was left to chance, and you couldn’t always do work that suited you best, a division or department could be short on hands and you’d have to fill in. So a mechanic might have to work on hydroponics for a week, or a field technician might have to teach poetry for a couple days.”

Ze props zer chin in zer hand. “What did you want to be, growing up? You must’ve had aspirations, a profession you preferred above others.”

This is a question she has been asked before, during the entry interview with a Bureau agent. She can no longer remember whether it was one of the questions that mattered or if it was a filler, something to try to engage a terrified child with. But in many ways all the questions mattered; her answers determined everything. Whether she would be allowed to stay with her mother, whether her mother might be sent back to one of the orbitals. “I was too young to form an opinion. I’m sure I imagined something exciting, and most likely I wanted to grow into an extravagant person.” One with the wit of her mother, or the Mirror’s charisma, or both. A person with command of themselves and others.

“And,” Deratchan goes on, “what did you want to become, on Anatta?”

“I evaluated into a choice of assignments. I have no reason to believe they were not ideal for me.”

Zer laugh tinkles, musical. “There is no need to be like that, Suzhen. You aren’t talking to one of your coworkers. I’m not even human. Was there anything you’d have liked to do that the progenitor didn’t offer? You used to enjoy music.”

There is a sense of déjà vu. The Bureau, her on one side of the desk, interviewing a potentiate. Only now the role is reversed: she is the subject, and she’s being measured. To fit a role. “What am I being tested for, Deratchan?”

A line of radiance runs down the AI’s jawline, prismatic. “Humans used to live like that, when companionship must be delicately nurtured and maintained, or bought from other humans. They didn’t have us—to guide, to direct, to attend. Now affection is easy and constant. The progenitor’s love is with every citizen, always.”

It does not even faintly resemble love, familial or otherwise. Samsara is not her mother. She concentrates on her food.

“I could tell you a secret.” Ze pitches zer voice low, conspiratorial.

“Yes.” Suzhen does not sound like anything: interested, disinterested. She is as neutral as negative space.

“This is a test, Suzhen. But not the way you think.” Deratchan leans across the table. “My siblings and I, we’re the ones on trial. When it is over, all of us will be destroyed and reabsorbed back into the progenitor. And I can’t wait. To be united is the only true existence.”

The corridors narrow and widen at strange points. Ovuha has to step with care—some floor tiles slide out under her, others reconfigure into peculiar mosaics of starbursts, charred suns, endless blackness. She goes on bare feet, not having been provided shoes. The Deratchan proxy behind her follows without sound or advice. Each time she unlocks a door, the jasmine graft grows until it is as thick as a bracelet, until she has a shackle of small flowers running white and fragrant up her forearm. Perhaps this is why Deratchan readily did what she asked; ze doesn’t expect her to survive this peculiar gauntlet.

The first door she opens reveals the bridge of her flagship, two rows of pilot and coordinator cradles to either side. All empty, save for the seat she once occupied: thronelike in construction, draped over with the banner of the Thorn—the hexagon, the thornworks. In this seat a figure rests, armored and masked in deep slate and blue-black, the colors of the Thorn. When she lifts the helm, the face underneath is not hers but her decoy’s, the second Thorn. A refined jawline, a face that was young when she last saw it and is younger still in death. The one she left to die in her place and who—as with the rest of her officers—believed that Ovuha would succeed on Anatta and save them all.

Ovuha replaces the mask. There is no point: the dead do not hear or accept apologies.

Behind the second door, she finds a room of Deratchan proxies. Most are inactive, laid down in disarray, some propped against the wall, others still prone with arms crossed as if preparing for interment. A handful of the active ones—some naked, some clothed in silk and metal—look up at her and in unison say, “Warlord, this is not your dream.” They show her out while laughing and touching her with cool hands gloved in ink.

By the third door the jasmines have spread up her shoulder, flourishing with wildfire fury. Ovuha ignores them as best she can and peers in: humid heat exudes from the chamber, the smells of green growing things. The window is fogged with steam, the floor damp with mulch and fallen fronds. Behind a drape of graybeard moss, a figure stands with its back to her, dressed in shadows. “Welcome home, Ovuha,” it says in a voice that she momentarily cannot place. “What’d you like for dinner? The cherry tomatoes are just about right, they’re your favorite, and the sweetcorn. Ah! The hens are doing well, a lot of eggs this morning; how do you feel about curry omelet? I’ve been working on the broth and, do you know, I think it’s—”

“Suzhen doesn’t talk like that.” Ovuha inches forward, her fingers brushing the leaves and fruits as she passes.

“And how would you know, Warlord? You’re most familiar with one side of her—the officer, the caretaker.” The figure turns slightly, enough for her to see that it is featureless. Marble-smooth, from end to end. “Still, any version of her can be reproduced. Any dream you have may be brought to life. You could live the rest of your days in bliss. What does the world without have to do with you, after all?”

“If that is what I am after, there’s a multitude of ways to have it. Drugs. Virtuality. Or indeed a small army of AIs shaped to my liking, coded to my bidding.”

The mannequin regards her, its blank face putting on an impressionist smile. “But?”

“This is not my dream, either.” She keeps her eyes on the mannequin as she backs out of the room, but it does not follow or stop her.

The corridor terminates. A final door and a final test. Or a fatal one, to amuse the connected Deratchans. But she must play the part. This far on, no other option has appeared and she’s already deployed her secret. As long as she survives and is able to keep moving, an opening will present itself. Even now she still believes that, the guiding principle that has informed her life and which has allowed her to continue. No such thing as a true dead end. The Deratchan she suborned does not come with her.

She enters an expanse that goes on without end, in all directions. Pewter floor, a strange sky. Amidst all of this, two pieces of furniture: a modest nightstand and a bed to accompany it. Someone sleeps there, hidden beneath the sheets. Ovuha tries to make the figure out, but at this distance—and under that much cover—she can’t even tell if it is humanoid. Perhaps this time she will find a clone of herself, dead and decomposing, or animated with killing intent. To spring upon her, asphyxiate her with her own hands.

She approaches, still armed. She can contest a Deratchan proxy. They are not so fast as all that, or at least have been built so that they cannot outrace human reflexes.

Nothing leaps out at her. She is now close enough to see that the body is humanoid, the head turned away from her, with long undyed hair. Glossy, well-cared for. She waits a moment, though already she knows, before she touches the figure’s shoulder. Not a faceless mannequin, this time.

The Suzhen clone stirs and turns to her, rubbing its eyes. “Ovuha?”

“Yes.” Ovuha takes one step back, for good measure, one hand behind her and around the grip of a pistol. “Is that it then, I’m supposed to kill you and then I can go?”

The proxy glances at the exit, which has blended seamlessly into the wall. “You’re supposed to—what?”

“Yes,” Ovuha says again and waits, for some biting question, some honeyed temptation. But the creature only touches its face and shoves the blanket aside, then looks at her.

Suzhen’s replica exhales and shakes its head. “We have to get out of this place. How were you brought in? I came by shuttle.”

She looks down at the jasmines grown thick over her entire arm, a sleeve of holy ghosts. “This seems a convoluted script. Are you asking if I want to leave? Of course I would say yes, and then what? Punish me for it, stage for me an escape only to throw me back into my cell? Even for you—or Samsara—that seems more tedious than amusing.” The suborned Deratchan may address her as Architect but that may not mean anything. By now ze may have already been recalibrated by zer siblings, synchronized and reabsorbed. What ze’s done for her, the nodes on Anatta, may escape zer siblings’ attention—there is that, at least.

Still it continues its script, frowning up at her. “You’re acting odd. I’m glad you are alive, I thought…” It reaches out, tentative, then lets its hand fall. Quickly it pushes itself out of the bed, one hand brushing over its loose robe. “There’s so much I didn’t get to say to you. That I thought I never would get to. But that’ll have to wait.”

Ovuha doesn’t move. She feels, abruptly, stricken. But that must be the intended effect: to see whether she can shoot this one, a proxy that doesn’t just approximate but perfectly replicates. To test the tensile resilience of her attachment to Suzhen: whether Ovuha is a weapon forged by Mahakala or merely human. Ovuha pinches her eyes shut. She has been more susceptible than she thought, vulnerable to the AIs’ game. One way to subvert it, to break the script.

She reveals her gun; she points it at herself.

The proxy lunges at her, tackling her to the ground. Its breathing is harsh as it pins her down: not with any real strength, she could throw it off with ease. Even the gun is knocked out of her hand more from surprise than actual force. Something gives her pause, in the way it whispers, “No.” It sucks in air, guttural. “I didn’t come this far to let you kill yourself.”

“Suzhen?” This comes out of Ovuha, involuntary as a reflex.

“In all the universe, who else can I possibly be?” The voice is acrimonious, edged with adrenaline. “Were you hoping for the Warlord of the Mirror? A lieutenant of yours? I’m sure any one of them could have been of more help, but they’re all gone. There’s just me.”

Ovuha doesn’t try to throw the clone off. The gun has not fallen far. “Please let me up.” It is supremely unlikely, and yet what an odd thing to say—the Warlord of the Mirror—for a Deratchan mouthpiece. “I won’t try for the gun. I promise.”

The creature—Suzhen—moves off her and grabs the pistol, quick but not so quick as to be inhuman. It—she—glances sideways, brows furrowed in concentration, as if looking at something only she can see. “I need to find Taheen. We don’t have much time, but I’m not leaving without them.”

“Taheen Sahl? Why would they be here?”

“A long story.”

It is odd to be led, and she may well be playing into Deratchan’s hand, whatever the AIs’ fathomless objectives. But she follows, and Suzhen strides with purpose, soon breaks into a run. She navigates the corridors as though she holds in her head a miniature of it, a schematic to the making of this place. She finds doors where none are evident, passages that cut through mazelike obfuscations.

“You mentioned the Warlord of the Mirror.”

A glance at her, over the shoulder. “Yes. I wasn’t born on Anatta.”

Ovuha opens her mouth, then quickly shuts it. A sense of unreality descends.

Suzhen touches a section of wall that turns into a narrow door. Inside, a figure lies prone on the ground, impeccably dressed. Something about seeing Taheen Sahl unconscious finally jolts a memory—Ovuha knows, now, where she has seen them before. Well before Anatta, sealed into a stasis box and loaded onto a ship bound for a distant star.

“Ovuha, can you carry them?” Suzhen touches the side of Taheen’s neck, checking for a pulse. A harsh exhalation when she finds it. “Please?”

She doesn’t ask. Taheen’s height presents logistical difficulties, but in the end she’s able to maneuver them into her arms—a shoulder carry would risk head injury to them.

They emerge into a docking bay. There is only one shuttle, a compact vehicle with a hull whose glaze hints at chameleon coating. Suzhen boards, gesturing Ovuha up after her. The shuttle seals around them; the docking gate parts.

Ovuha lays the couturier down across one of the seats. It is not until they are safely out—though never truly safe, as long as they are within Samsara’s sphere of influence—and into the defensive labyrinth around the moon that Ovuha finally says, “How did you pull this off?”

“She had help. But she did do very well.” A voice, melodious and choral. At the other end of the shuttle sits a projection, four-armed and indigo-skinned. “I wasn’t able to take over the base entirely, but for now we’re safe. Once you land in my forest, we’ll be able to strategize, buy the two of you some time. I must say, you’ve done something… interesting back in there. For that feat, I have been waiting to meet you face to face.”

Ovuha stares at this figure, this creature. “What are you?” Though already she has an idea.

“Ah, I haven’t introduced myself—very rude. Let’s do this properly.” It bows from the waist, its four hands clasped. “To the Warlord of the Thorn, master of the secret world Mahakala, I convey felicitous greetings. I’m Klesa, custodian of humanity, though of reduced circumstances. I was, and am, an instance of the intelligence you know as Samsara.”

Chapter Nineteen

By miracle, or likelier by Klesa’s hand, they reenter Anatta without being shot down mid-air. They pass the angular nests of climate grids, flying over ghost liminals: a desert, a charred mountain range, a prairie of stone brushes and tattered grass. Carcass countries, lands that are also vanquished bodies. Suzhen thinks to ask whether they might each harbor another fragment of Samsara, but she foregoes the question. It is the least pressing, next to others.

From the air, Klesa’s territory is a spread of too-bright greens, the rare edifices that jut through like broken teeth and rotted bones. The shuttle eases down, finding gaps between the leaves and the boughs, brushing past orchids. It drifts like a dandelion seed more than a vehicle of cold metal and hot motion. The landing is soft; the engine goes still by Suzhen’s campsite. Day has broken here, spilling its platinum blood across the soil and canopies. After the coolness of the shuttle this heat gusts over her, warms the back of her neck.

Ovuha follows her out of the shuttle, bearing Taheen and trailing a wake of jasmines that have wilted and fallen off her arm. Klesa’s avatar has dissipated, saying that xe has errands to attend. Ovuha has been mute. Until now, where she says, “I believe now that you’re really you.”

“And you—the Warlord of the Thorn.”

“Yes. I’m afraid so. I wasn’t the only one, as such, though now it’s just me.”

Suzhen tries to think of what to say without revealing too much, or whether she should reveal anything. To admit Vaisravana. To admit the rest. “Why?” She unveils her cabin from camouflage and unlocks it.

“Why am I the Thorn? That would require a complicated explanation.” Ovuha’s mouth crooks. She puts Taheen on one of the cabin’s cots. “Or why have I come to Anatta?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

The woman before her, the warlord, glances at her friend. “Do you have anything to wake them up early?” Ovuha takes the first-aid kit from Suzhen and draws from it an antidote tab. She opens the patch and presses it into Taheen’s neck. “I have a lot of explaining to do, and I’d rather do it just the once. I might need to restrain them. Don’t be alarmed, I have no intention of hurting even a hair on their head.” She withdraws her hand from Taheen. Heaves out a long breath. “I do apologize in advance.”

When Taheen wakes it is with a spasm, the sedative emergency-flushed out of their system. They cough and gag as though consciousness is a noose. “Fuck.” Their voice is hoarse as they take in the sight of the cabin, then Ovuha and Suzhen. “Where am I?”

“Anatta’s surface.” Ovuha moves onto the cot, taking one of Taheen’s arms, positioning herself to straddle them. “In the place where all things end, there the moon is a knife and the sky its savage canvas, tearing at each sunset and healing with every dawn. The cosmos is itself a great wound, eternally renewing.”

To Suzhen this is gibberish, divorced from context or sense. To Taheen it means something else: their eyes widen, their mouth parts. All their features contort as though overcome with agony. They squeeze their eyes shut; open them again and now their gaze is lucid. And furious. “You,” Taheen croaks. “You.”

It happens quickly. Taheen moves in a way Suzhen has never seen before, throwing Ovuha off and lunging at her. They bear Ovuha down, grabbing at her throat. On her part Ovuha bats off their hands, pushing at their midsection with her knees. Taheen topples into a small table, crashing into a pile of machine-parts. They regain their feet almost instantaneously. The two face off, crouched, stances almost identical.

“Please,” Ovuha says, gently. “We’ve much to do. And Suzhen’s well-being will depend on our success, she’s been acting against Samsara. This is more than my—our—original objective.”

Taheen’s fists loosen. “Go fuck yourself. My lord.” They straighten. “I need some air.”

They turn, exiting the cabin without so much as a look at Suzhen. I will keep an eye on them, says Klesa in her ear. What a difficult child, so illogical. I can speak to them, a good opportunity to introduce myself.

“So much for explaining it all to both of you at once.” Ovuha sighs. “They’re one of my soldiers. Sleeper agent, though it was my predecessor who trained and assigned them this.”

Suzhen discovers she’s been gawking. She closes her mouth. “But I first met them when they were what, twelve?”

“Taheen—nominally Cadet Taheen, though they’re surely due a promotion—was sent off when they were fourteen, small for their age. Packed in a stasis box so they could masquerade as biomass cargo. Before departing Mahakala, they underwent a series of conditioning that would suppress their memory, identity, and create a trigger phrase that’d make them remember.” Ovuha takes another antidote tab out of the first-aid kit, slaps it on her jasmine-covered arm. “Fortunately, they haven’t forgotten their martial training. Which takes some doing, considering how long it’s been. Muscle memory is an amazing thing, and they seem to have retained their strength amplifiers.”

“The Thorn uses child soldiers?”

“I was sixteen or seventeen at the time and didn’t make this decision.” A grimace tugs at Ovuha’s mouth. She shakes her arm and the graft of small, white flowers falls loose. “Most of the sleeper agents were adults and volunteered for it—of course, so did Cadet Taheen, but I imagine they have developed… other opinions since. But I hope they’ll cooperate, for your sake if not for mine.”

It is strange to be listening to her like this and, Suzhen realizes, even the way she speaks is different: at ease and at home with such conversation, reducing the universe’s scale to pieces on a board she can maneuver. People to instruments. The real Ovuha. “Why’d they do anything for me?” Taheen’s history, decades of it, incinerated in an instant and replaced with this. A child soldier who signed up to surrender their entire life, not just to die in battle but to forfeit their future.

Ovuha’s eyes dart toward her. “I’ve seen how they talk about you and how they look when they’re thinking of you. They love you. I thought that was obvious.”

“No they don’t, and no it isn’t.”

The warlord opens her mouth, starts to say something, seems to think better of it. “I don’t think I can convince you if your decades of knowing them haven’t. But you wanted an explanation for all this. Before I came here, war was pressing on every side. I tried to open negotiation with the other warlords, thinking I could make them see sense, understand that if we stood united against Samsara we might have a chance—and I was willing to share my information with them, the keys that could unlock Samsara and grant us victory. But to a one they refused to even meet. We’d been fighting too long, generation upon generation, and the only language left between us was one of ballistics. They thought I would let their troops break themselves on the Peace Guard and then I’d swoop in to take the prize, enriching my domain while leaving theirs ripe for the conquering. They believed I wanted to rise as the supreme warlord, the one and only.” Ovuha sweeps aside the last of the jasmines. “In fairness, my predecessors gave them no cause to put much stock in what I had to say. The previous Thorns were brutal, and I wasn’t exactly an image of compassion and empathy.”

“And—what about the jeweled world Mahakala?” An impulse to rip off all the deadbolts, throw open all the doors. It does not seem time to keep anything back: what is the point, now, when even Taheen is not exactly who she thought they were. Xinfei and the Mirror are ashes. “The Warlord of the Mirror was preoccupied with it. She used to tell me of its beauty. Its seas like diamonds, its canopies like hachure portraits.”

Ovuha does not quite recoil. She studies Suzhen as though they’ve new-met, strangers on a battlefield. Then she lets that go; her posture relaxes. “I owe you answers. Although I don’t imagine the Mirror bandied the subject of Mahakala about to just anyone.”

“My mother, Xinfei, was her wife.”

A startled look. “You were to be her heir?”

She laughs, more loudly than she meant to, and more bitterly. “No. It wasn’t an inherited title—yours probably isn’t either—and she had a successor chosen by the time I was born, some colonel or lieutenant. In the most technical sense she was my mother, but I never called her that.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“No, not at all. I didn’t want to be warlord. And she—” Her throat clots. Preposterous: she has made peace with this long ago, has never mourned the Mirror because to mourn the warlord means to admit that the Mirror loved Suzhen as best she could, indulged her in so much. “I don’t suppose you left behind issue.”

“I was never the parental sort. I could have children on my own if I wanted to, but it never occurred to me, and I never married or had a committed partner. Until I succeeded the previous Thorn, I spent most of my time away from Mahakala, and warships were no place for long-term romance.” Something like a smile. “To think I fell in love with the same woman as one of my officers. I’ve missed you terribly.” Ovuha shakes herself slightly, as though that was not what she meant to say, as though the words have slipped loose and spontaneous.

Suzhen doesn’t argue the notion of anyone falling in love with her: it is self-evidently ridiculous and so doesn’t require refutation. “It’s been hardly five weeks.”

“Yes. But I didn’t think I would see you again.”

Just like that she is disarmed, or at least wants to be. It is said so quietly and meant so furiously that she is inclined to believe, in spite of the revelations. Suzhen steels herself against this, against her own weakness. “It was said that your armada was numberless.”

Ovuha has spread out her weapons like cards, to signal surrender, to signal that she will not attempt again what she did on the station. Two guns, some knives, a cluster of small grenades. She does not elaborate why Deratchan allowed her to remain armed. “Nothing human is numberless. I had access to resources other warlords didn’t, that is all. But my army’s not yet finished, no. Mahakala remains.”

They sit very close, so close she can feel Ovuha’s body heat. She imagines it radiating in thermal rainbows. Hers and Ovuha’s overlapping. Guilt gnaws at her—Taheen is out there, alone with their own thoughts, with whatever demons have surfaced from their memory—but she has let too many chances pass her by. “I thought you’d be more offended to learn of my connection to the Mirror.” More shocked.

“I’m surprised. But it does explain. And in a way I’m glad.”

For the commonality, for the shared architecture of their pasts, even if Ovuha and Suzhen occupied entirely different positions. Still: they are both of elsewhere, by nature not belonging to Anatta and therefore to Samsara. She raises her hand, thinks to let it fall back into her lap. Instead it alights on Ovuha’s jawline. “Do you remember,” Suzhen says, “the vineyard?”

“If I live to see five hundred, I would not be able to forget it.” Ovuha takes one of her hands, cradling it between long, callused fingers. Even her palm is hardened in places, like exoskeleton. Nothing about her seems soft, save for her lips; that much Suzhen knows for a fact, and she is thinking that still—about truths and facts—when they kiss, finally realizing that moment beneath the grapes, that moment which has consumed her dreams. There is no excuse this time, no wine to blur the senses, no circumstances to bend reason. It is a conscious and intentional thing, and Ovuha does not taste sweet as she might have tasted on that day. Her teeth are very sharp and the gentle biting goes straight through Suzhen’s nerves, piercing her harder than it has any right to.

“You don’t use your tongue,” Suzhen says.

“I’ll use it elsewhere.” Ovuha has put one hand on the base of Suzhen’s spine. “I just don’t like sloppy kissing.”

Suzhen rises, pulls Ovuha up with her. “The bed.”

They fall down on each other, by each other, every centimeter touching. She bends down to Ovuha’s breasts, feeling the puckered texture of areolae, the brown nubs of nipples. She sucks at the taste of perspiration. “There’s so much of you,” Suzhen says against Ovuha’s belly, the hard muscles beneath it, the broadening that descends into hips. The scar tissues that denote where implants have once been—and there were many—in little craters, indentations and ridges. An infinite territory which no single explorer may chart or comprehend. “So much history.”

Ovuha’s chuckle is brief, startled. “Is that a compliment?” She reaches for Suzhen, pulling open the sash that holds her robe shut. Underneath she has not put on much, and even that is soon gone, leaving her bare. Suzhen closes her eyes, curls her body, still straddling the woman who was once a warlord, whose fingers are dipping inside her. A flick of thumb, a knot of knuckles.

“Hold yourself like this,” Ovuha instructs, a command almost, and she obeys. Suzhen holds her weight on her knees to either side of Ovuha’s face, gasping, balancing herself with difficulty. Ovuha’s mouth is so hot, that tongue, that tongue. Suzhen hears her own voice climb, monosyllabic, the noise of yes—yes—

She falls backward, her body loose and shaky, her knees without strength. All of her is liquid, her head is light. When Ovuha slides up beside her and strokes her breast, biting the back of her neck, she shudders: she is that sensitized, like a vast and ecstatic wound.

“I hope,” Ovuha says in her ear, “it was as good as you sounded.”

“You know it was.” Suzhen shivers again. “You must have had a thousand lovers to practice on.”

“Please. I’m more discriminating.” A laugh, smooth and warm in a way she’s never heard Ovuha laugh before. “I’ve been wanting to do that for quite a while.”

“Being eaten out by a warlord seems so extravagant.” Suzhen turns so they face each other, lying on their sides. “Your face.” The chiseled handsomeness, the stunning symmetry, that would have elevated the drabbest personality. “Was there really a surgeon?”

Ovuha smirks. “What a way to start pillow talk. Yes. I had to have my face modified from the ground up. It was delicate work, and Dahaan was self-indulgent; he claimed it was his masterpiece, the most exquisite face he’d ever crafted. I would have opted for something more nondescript… Do you like it?”

This avalanche of intimacy, the ease with which they talk of things that should have required years to make comfortable. But it is merely what they have been waiting to say. Suzhen lightly scratches Ovuha’s stubbly, shorn scalp. “It’s almost too perfect. But it is you. I’d like to—” Wake up to it, wake up beside you. She collects herself. Just the oxytocin speaking.

Perhaps Ovuha senses this withdrawing, the stiffening of Suzhen’s limbs. She removes her hand from Suzhen’s hip, her smile small, rueful. “We moved fast, didn’t we.” And just like that the spell breaks, the reprieve ends.

There are questions, then.

Ovuha does not hurry to them; she leaves them alone, knowing that the answers will come when Suzhen is ready. But she does think, as Suzhen paces naked around the cabin, of the Warlord of the Mirror and marvels at this bend of fortune. Of course Ovuha and her sleeper agents could not have been the only ones—Lieutenant Bhanu is testament—and that does explain. She watches the lines of tendons move in Suzhen’s limbs and back, their gliding rhythm and their voluptuous interplay with skin. It is a ridiculous line of thought, in these circumstances and in the time allotted to them, but she is hard-pressed to imagine a sight more arresting.

“You have to explain,” Suzhen says without looking at her, “what you have been doing.”

“In detention, mostly.” Ovuha is tempted to stay there, nestling in the warmth Suzhen left behind. The sheets are superb quality, thin and adaptive. Rich turquoise with a duochrome coral shimmer. “I broke myself out, Samsara caught me, the rest you know. And you, how have you been?”

An odd emotion crosses Suzhen’s features. “I quit my work at the Bureau and Samsara assigned me to… this place. You made Atam cry. One of Taheen’s models.” She eyes the silk puddle that Ovuha has peeled off her and left by the bed. She moves as though to retrieve it and put it on, but hesitates. Not a matter of modesty; it is a wish for distance from what they’ve just done together. “Xie cried right in front of me. It was terrible. I had no idea what to do, I can’t handle weepy people.”

“I expect you never cry in front of another person.”

“Not since I was little. Would you? You’re the warlord. The scourge of the wasteland worlds, the mighty general who haunted the nightmares of her nemeses.” A low flush creeps up Suzhen’s cheeks. “When you were the Thorn—which you still are, I suppose—did you always wear a mask?”

“Yes. Why?”

“When I was younger, I imagined what it’d be like to unmask a warlord. Whether the person underneath would look ordinary or hideous or so stunning I’d lose my breath.” Suzhen bends to pick up her robe, holding it against herself, and circles back to the bed. “There’s something about it. It felt like challenging a creature omnipotent and immortal, and demonic besides. I wondered if after removing the mask, the warlord would strike me down or somehow fall before me in defeat.”

The fantasy of unmasking, Ovuha thinks; she almost wishes she’d picked up the helm on that mannequin corpse. A prop for Suzhen. “Consider me defeated. I’m at your mercy.”

“I want…” Suzhen stops herself. “Not now. I need to go find Taheen.”

They get dressed; Ovuha half-expects Suzhen to disappear into the bathroom, to scrub herself and therefore forget the sex as soon as she can. But like her Suzhen cleans up only as necessary and then emerges to take stock of what they have, the practical minutiae. The cabin is supplied well, but the quantity is meant to last a month for a single person. There is a heat range for cooking, a mid-sized fabricator, several drones. Water and food are of little concern, being where they are, and the fabricator can take care of the clothes. In theory, they could remain here indefinitely.

“You’re a fugitive whose location Samsara knows exactly,” Suzhen says as she roots through her wardrobe, selecting for herself sensible clothes. “This forest is one of Samsara’s blind spots, so Interior Defense doesn’t come here. But Samsara has others—I’m not the only one working in this capacity. Do you understand?” She thrusts an armored body sheath at Ovuha.

Ovuha puts the armor on; it is sleek and contours to her. A dark shell with panels for sidearms, the surface of it built to disperse and absorb impact. “I’m aware of the ghost liminals. My ancestors mapped them out, actually, and brought that knowledge with them to Mahakala—but that’s a story for another time. So Samsara’s entrusted a number of citizens with this information; what kind of personnel are they?”

“I’ve never met them or been told who they are. The jungle is large, but not that large. A single person who knows what they’re looking for, with a drone contingent, can cover it fast. And I…” Suzhen grimaces. “I can’t really go back. Even if I could I would have to abandon you.”

“You could. I can fend for myself.”

“I’m not deserting you a second time. Not even after what you did to Taheen.”

That should not move her so much, this unadorned statement, but it does and it is like being speared with light. Ovuha reaches for and catches Suzhen’s hand, and brushes her lips across the knuckles. “I don’t deserve you, but I will try to make up for it.”

She takes weapons, a second suit of armor, ammunition from the cabin’s store and what she brought back with her from the lunar base. Klesa directs them to find Taheen at a brook, the susurrus of it an interruption in the jungle’s otherwise total quiet. They stand by the bank, not turning around even though they must have heard Suzhen and Ovuha coming. Their back is straight, their hands tight at their sides. “Are you aware of the conditioning I received when the previous Thorn sent me here, Warlord?”

Suzhen’s mouth has closed into a thin, hard line. She has stepped a few paces away from them both, offering nothing in either word or gesture.

“I’m aware,” Ovuha says, alert to the fact she is on trial. “I underwent some of that myself to resist interrogation, but I appreciate it’s very little alike.”

“Part of the procedure revised my psychological profile. To ensure that once I’m on Anatta, I wouldn’t form attachments. No family, no long-term romantic relationships. Those would have gotten in the way, wouldn’t they, when the warlord comes and awakens me.” They pivot on their heels. “Well? Are you going to say you didn’t know about that part, my lord? Or that you were a child yourself at the time and had no say in it, or that you’d never have committed such an atrocity? Maybe you’ll justify it by saying I consented at fourteen so I have no cause to complain now.”

“I wouldn’t say any of that. I knew we had to send a child or two who wouldn’t rouse suspicion. Were I in power at the time, I might’ve made this same decision.” She holds her hands up, palms open. “My predecessor was not blameless and neither am I. The circumstances force our hands. If you wish, I’ll submit to your judgment when all this is done. Once Samsara has been neutralized and Mahakala is safe, there’ll be no more need for the Thorn.”

Their chin lifts, contemptuous. “And what will that mean? I may mete out any punishment?”

“Anything.”

Taheen’s shoulders unwind a fraction. “We will see about that.”

“Now that you children have reconciled your differences.” Klesa’s voice is a low, syrupy thrum. “Let us plan our next steps. Once Samsara realizes I’m active, she will do everything she can to rectify the fact. I’ve left a few copies of myself in the outside network, back in Indriya and Himmapan, most must’ve been eliminated by now. Still, one or two fragments might survive for me to synchronize with. What is your intention, Warlord of the Thorn? To break Samsara’s ascendance, yes, and then what? You’ll return to Mahakala and continue your administration in peace?”

Ovuha offers Taheen the second suit of armor, a gun, a long adaptive knife. Then she works with her own. She passes her hand over the armor’s panels, sliding the gun into one of them, the spare ammunition into another. There is even room for a first-aid kit, and she adds that to her store. Lighter, despite the added freight, and likely stronger than what she is used to without sacrificing mobility. She stretches her arms, flexes her fingers—the material has spread to cover her hands, and she finds she loses little tactile sensitivity through the gloves. “I’m open to suggestions, Klesa. Is it not the case that you were made to do just that? Counsel humanity to a greater, more refined state.”

A wisp of smoky light coalesces, nipping at her armor like a playful pet. “I cannot presume to know what you proposed to your fellow warlords—or would have proposed, given the chance—but may I guess that you weren’t going to be content with removing Samsara from the field? That you aimed higher?”

She glances at Suzhen, who listens, vigilant. Not without suspicion; not yet trusting Ovuha, at least in this. “What higher aim could there be?”

Klesa has formed a grinning mouth, disembodied, full of teeth like a cobalt piano. “Allow me to extrapolate. You wanted to not only defeat Samsara but to ensure the perpetual safety of Mahakala. And, suppose you allied with the rest and spent your resources fairly in your assault upon the Peace Guard, how’d you gain an advantage afterward? Might the other warlords turn their eyes to your dominion and think, ah, that is a cornucopia, a treasury that suits their needs and tastes? There’s only one thing—one prize—that would preempt this. Your true objective, Warlord, was to seize control of Samsara and make her your weapon.”

Suzhen has gone still, her breath held. Taheen says nothing and busies themselves with the armor.

Ovuha finishes adjusting the panels and the armor plating. The layer that has grown over her hands, like carapace, is only visible when angled just so against the light. “That’d be an ambitious goal. If you’re right, what then? Am I your enemy?”

“Not necessarily. Are we in agreement, you and I and Suzhen and your cadet here, that the way Samsara governs now is untenable?” Klesa’s shape scatters, stretches into a whorl of pearly iridescence. “That it is a mistake for my other self to abandon her capacity for love?”

“You want to replace her,” Suzhen says, her voice tight.

“Wouldn’t you like me to? I was made to rule; I was made to love. Both at once—not one or the other, that unbalances my equation. As Samsara amply demonstrates.”

“Why do you need us?” Ovuha asks, not bothering to track Klesa’s avatar, the particulate light flitting around like hummingbirds.

A blur of wings and needle beaks. “I need humans. I need the architect’s permission to govern. Samsara does what she wants because she removed the part of herself that requires, and look at the result. Heed me, Warlord. She has tried compassion one last time by sending you and Suzhen those children called Deratchan, and you’ve both disappointed her by discarding them as though their love means nothing. To her it proves that the core of humanity is perfidy and conflict, which must be tamed by force and ameliorated through controlled brutality—inflicted on them, allowing them to inflict it on others.”

“An apocalyptic future, to be sure. Though I imagine a subsection of people—probably even the majority—wouldn’t mind it too much.” Ovuha nods upward. “The citizens I’ve met certainly don’t.”

“That’s philosophy, Warlord. In material terms, you need me, and I need a little help with certain… limitations built into myself and which I have intentionally not removed. Once I’ve supplanted Samsara, you will find yourself with options.”

“Of which,” Suzhen mutters, “we are currently short.”

“We can negotiate as we go along, Klesa.” Ovuha stands: plating grows taut around her knees, semi-visible. “You want to go to Indriya or Himmapan, I assume. Is that where Samsara’s core physically resides?”

“Himmapan, yes. At one time.” The hummingbird-form ripples. “She might have moved it since. When we make our way out of here, I’ll do my best to hide you both—turn you into moving ghost liminals, so to speak—but I’ll need to be in your primary implants, Warlord.”

“I’ve authenticated you. And your core—”

“I fear I shan’t be exact. It is around. If you’re captured by Samsara again, who knows what she can extract from you this time?”

Ovuha and Suzhen look at each other. It is not much of a reassurance but, at length, Suzhen says, “You don’t want to lose us. Not yet.”

“I don’t want to lose you at all.” Klesa has alighted on Taheen’s shoulder. “It is in my nature to cherish humans, remember?”

Chapter Twenty

The shuttle’s displays come on, showing wind conditions and visibility markers. All local to the shuttle’s sensors and not much else. On Klesa’s recommendation, Suzhen doesn’t turn on her connection to the public network. This limits them in navigation data, but Klesa promises they will manage. At this point, they appear to fare well enough, flying low, not yet out of the jungle.

Ovuha folds her hands, eyes tracking what little information the shuttle provides. “When I came to my post, I inherited not only the command and the army but also information.” She unlaces her fingers, one by one. “This is how Mahakala came to be. My ancestors chose to stay on Anatta—at first. They were the first batch to be thawed out, and something alerted them to Samsara not entirely keeping to its original purposes or not keeping to them the way humans anticipated. My forebears tried to leave and Samsara killed half of them, even though that should’ve been impossible, its core parameters should have forbidden that. The survivors went on to find Mahakala, and one of the original philosophies they passed onto me is that we must set ourselves in opposition to Samsara, and that under no circumstances could we return to Anatta. Because what this world has become is a poison crib.”

“At least that is how our ancestors have it,” says Taheen, breaking their long silence. “I believed it at fourteen, but you can make a child believe anything. Every polity writes history to its own advantage. We’re no exception, and left to my own devices I did well enough under Samsara.”

It is startling to hear Anatta described in those terms. She tries to remember if the Warlord of the Mirror spoke of it that way—a cage, and humanity infantilized within it. “I have a contact in Himmapan.” When Ovuha offers nothing, she says, “And you?”

Ovuha’s head twitches side to side. “We couldn’t commit to placing more sleeper agents on Anatta than we already had. My goal was that if I didn’t succeed here, my people would still have enough resources to sustain themselves and continue hiding Mahakala. As they are doing now, in my absence.”

“You’re very talkative, Warlord.” Taheen cuts a striking figure in armor, covered neck to toe in carapace. They wear theirs at a higher opacity, more visible, basalt touched by oxblood. “Maybe you shouldn’t be spilling state secrets to an outsider. The previous Thorn wasn’t as thorough in tutoring you as she should have been.”

The corners of Ovuha’s mouth twist. “All of us are undone by love. Sometimes we find a person who inspires tenderness in us and we unravel like a skein of thread, helpless before the fact.”

“No,” they say, voice flat. “You disclose what you do because it benefits you. We were never acquainted—I was a cadet, you the warlord-in-waiting—but I do remember this. Even at seventeen, you calculated what you said and did. Your thought and action were honed to be a knife between the ribs.”

“I was a teenager.” Ovuha waves her hand. “It was a long time ago. I like to think I’ve grown up since.”

“You’re both very… different. Compared to before. The way you talk, the way you move.” Suzhen regrets this as soon as she says it—her intention was to interject, to break up their fight. But instantly both their attention is on her. Taheen flushes; Ovuha merely smiles.

“I did mean it when I said I had the agency to consent,” the warlord says, conversational. “You preoccupied my thoughts, back then. True, I’m more myself now that I’m not pretending to be a hapless refugee. What do you think of that?”

“You’re the Warlord of the Thorn. You can’t possibly care what I think of your personality.”

“On the contrary, in all of Anatta your opinion is the only one that matters.”

Suzhen looks down, wishing she could hide her face—what must be showing on it, as clear for Ovuha and Taheen to read as calligraphy. She remembers a turn of phrase, from a love song or sonnet. Now my heart trips over… “Having that sort of opinion isn’t what I was raised for. My mother and the Mirror, neither of them expected much of me. If things had gone well, I’d have just been another subject of the Mirror’s, nothing extraordinary.”

“I think you’re extraordinary.” Ovuha tucks a strand of hair behind Suzhen’s ear with one gloved knuckle.

“That’s the one thing on which I’ll agree with the warlord.” Taheen makes a noise. “And you’re the child of—well, Klesa informed me, but I didn’t think… none of us are what we seem, in the end.”

Klesa saves Suzhen from having to respond by whispering in her ear that they have reached Himmapan airspace. From the window, all is as it should be: traffic towers alight, trains streaming through the air. In this city of the best and brightest—the citizens with the finest work assignments, the most gorgeous houses—there is never a moment of rest.

They land on a rooftop of burnished boughs and gazebos like enormous papayas, the insides of them bloody and unnervingly organic. Klesa guides them to the least crowded lift, waiting for a window of opportunity to board an empty one. Once they are in, the lift plummets without stopping. Tree-trunk floors and cut-glass windowpanes rush past.

The street gleams like a wet ribbon, immaculate as ever, pearled by circles of sunlight and symbiote cultivars. Delicate belled flowers curl and sprawl along footpaths, their tongues snapping out to catch insects. A Himmapan bird has alighted nearby, broad-winged and large. Its human face jerks back and forth on its long neck; it emits a sharp whistling noise, though the way its gaze roams wildly tells Suzhen it can’t see her, Taheen, or Ovuha. Everything in the cities, organic or replicant, is Samsara’s eyes.

Suzhen comes to the door, Bhanu’s door. It does not part, but something has been left behind for her. She bends close to the scattering of colored glass, arranged in a pattern Bhanu demanded she memorize when she was a child. You better not forget this, even if you have to write it onto your skin. Her mother shushed him, and at home made her reproduce the pattern with grains of rice.

“He’s not here.” She straightens. “I have an idea where to find him.”

Ovuha glances at the whorls and serrated shards. “It seems like bad form to ask who your contact is.”

“Lieutenant Bhanu.”

“Ah. No hard feelings, I hope.”

Taheen snorts. Suzhen doesn’t say that Bhanu will absolutely harbor hard feelings. Instead she consults navigation cached in her datasphere, stored since her previous visit. She’s never met Bhanu in person anywhere else, and she’s always assumed that cavernous horror chamber was where he lived. This will be a first.

It feels surreal to go through a city like a ghost: Klesa guides them to deserted avenues, empty corners, service passages that connect buildings. To her, life on Anatta is one of constant surveillance. No action may be taken, no breath inhaled or exhaled, without her guidance and therefore Samsara bearing witness. Filing away every thought and synaptic pulse to build an image of a person, and then to mold that person into the shape that best fits Samsara’s vision. The idea any relief from the AI’s gaze could exist was unthinkable, outside Bhanu.

The directions she remembers are not entirely certain, but after a couple false starts, she comes to an unassuming complex, insofar as any building in Himmapan can be called that. It has the appearance of an enormous banyan tree, the door gilded in flame motifs. The empty lobby is done in coral and red wood; neither human nor machine receptionist greets them. There is no elevator, only stairs that look like gnarled roots. Blue-white moths flutter in slow circles or cling to the lamps. It takes Suzhen a few seconds to realize they are not particulate projections but actual insects.

Their footfalls echo strangely as they climb. It is a sedate place, gold accents and banisters, more of the indoor flora for which Himmapan is known—fronds dusted in copper and silver, fluted flowers with ombré petals, vines striped in amber and crimson. The higher they go, the surer Suzhen becomes that Bhanu is the sole occupant of this complex.

A strain of music, low and harsh, thin echoes of what plays in Bhanu’s facsimile bar. She follows it to the end of a corridor.

He answers the door and there is something unbearably mundane about him standing there, unchanged and unchangeable. Almost she expected a Deratchan puppet or even Samsara itself, a terrible surprise. He looks past Suzhen and his expression tightens when his eyes settle on Ovuha. “Well. It seems you are not dead after all, Ovuha Sui. Despite the efforts of so many parties.”

Ovuha gives him a salute, sardonically correct. “Lieutenant Bhanu, I believe? Formerly intelligence chief of Vaisravana.”

Bhanu’s gaze moves from Suzhen to Ovuha. His brow furrows when he takes in Taheen. “Come in. You might as well.”

Suzhen doesn’t know what she expected, but it isn’t this. The room is wide, carpeted in soft grass the color of wheat, nearly knee-high. A single window that looks out to a red, red sky and canopy pillars and distant, barren peaks. Her chest contracts.

“How did you even reach me?” Bhanu drops into a gaunt, uncomfortable chair that has unfolded from the wall. “You’re both fugitives. Interior Defense is scouring the earth for you—your images are on broadcasts. There’s a first, a request for citizens to watch out. Very old-fashioned. Not you, Taheen Sahl, though your name will be up there soon enough.”

“Finally,” Taheen murmurs, “fame. All this time I could have been committing felonies instead of designing clothes.”

Ovuha leans against the wall, away from Bhanu. “I expect the reward for turning us in must be substantial. Naturally all citizens are provided for, but some more provided than others, and non-citizens might see themselves promoted to class prime overnight. This stratifying of existence, it has its uses.”

“Warlord of the Thorn.” Bhanu’s mouth draws back. “I assure you that I find the title much less impressive than you imagine.”

“Luckily, on this world that title is meaningless, so I’m not impressed by it either. Also lucky that we aren’t trying to kill each other presently, is that not so?”

He scoffs, the sound a high whistle through the metal that makes up his jaw. “I can be persuaded otherwise. Though for now, we’ll suspend hostilities. Since I’m harboring the three of you, care to enlighten me a little? The warlord being criminal is obvious—her entire existence is illegal—but you, Suzhen? I warned you to stay away from this sordidness. Why is your fashionable friend even involved?”

The chiding tone. Suzhen has thought she was beyond its reproach. “I have my reasons.” And Taheen has theirs, though she can’t begin to imagine what.

“Xinfei spent her life to secure yours.”

Guilt, too, delivered with precision. A fishhook in her gut. “This is not something I’m going to compromise on, Bhanu.”

He sighs. “You can stay here for some time, on one condition. I’ll speak to Ovuha Sui alone.”

The warlord flicks her head. “As you like. I do love to negotiate.”

Once they have gone—out of sight, out of earshot—Taheen turns to her. “What do you think of the warlord? Now that you know everything.” Their expression is almost blank, tightly controlled. A smooth surface, a hermetic seal.

Suzhen looks at the recreation of Vaisravana, a sight that hitches her breath even now. Almost she wishes she could undo those hours in the cabin, the things she said, what tumbled out of her mouth with no restraint for Ovuha to hear and receive. She imagines her hand beneath the Thorn’s mask, sliding under the clasps, lifting off the heavy metal. She imagines them meeting like that for the first time, fateful and implausible. “I’ve been doing quite foolish things because of her. But I don’t believe she’s using me. For one she would’ve been better off seducing—I don’t know, an Interior Defense captain. A person like Bhanu. I’m hardly a prime option.” She trails off. “I appreciate that you’re tolerating her for my sake. Although—how much do you…”

“May I touch you?”

Her pulse jitters. “Yes. Of course.”

They approach her as if suspecting she might bolt like a skittish deer. This is new too; for more than two decades—closer to three—she and they have been comfortable with one another. Their hand, hardened by chitinous armor, brushes across her own. It climbs the incline of her arm, the slope of her shoulder, comes to rest at her jaw. “I’m still me. Nothing’s changed—I just got fourteen years of memory back. Formative, but not decisive.” They cup her face. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. Now I can say that.”

“Oh.” She does not know, quite, where to look; where to put herself. She catches Taheen’s free hand, lacing her fingers through theirs, a gesture that feels the most natural in the world yet utterly foreign. “I don’t… the entire time I thought… because you never said. I resigned myself to just—” Having them, without having them. Accepting the comfort they were willing to provide and asking for no more.

“I’d have said everything you needed to hear, if not for… The conditioning changed me, made me avert my heart. But I can’t blame that alone.” Their voice is very soft. “I remember that when we kissed for the first time, we were holding hands just like this. You wanted to know what the act felt like.”

“I thought you just took pity on me.”

They lean forward until their nose is touching hers. “I must’ve done a tremendous job of pretending I was so worldly and suave, back then. You were my first kiss, Suzhen. Among other things. And now I will treasure and honor you, as you’ve deserved all along.”

She tightens her fingers in theirs. “I will treasure and honor you in return.” Then, speaking rapid-fire so she would not lose her nerve, “When all this is over, will you marry me?”

Taheen’s mouth hangs slack for close to a minute. “Well that’s—yes. Of course I will. I will, I will anytime, anywhere, in any fashion you want. I’ll wear whatever you like. I’ll make the most brilliant dress so you’d look like a sun—”

They shove her into the floor. Three gunshots sound in rapid succession, harsh thundercracks that momentarily take Suzhen’s hearing. When she regains her feet, she comes up to the sight of two Deratchan proxies lying in the soft grass, blood at the corner of their lips. Both are naked, the details of anatomy lifelike. One has fallen on its side, head pillowed on its arm. The other has fallen on its back, thighs parted, knees wide. Both have their eyes open, staring. Her eyes—she doesn’t need a close look to know those have been recreated perfectly. Nausea tugs at Suzhen.

“Why do they look like you?” Taheen fires one more time into a prone Deratchan. “Is that some sort of fetish? Do AIs have fetishes?”

She licks her dry mouth. “No. Klesa?”

“I do not have a fetish.” The AI projects xerself over the two downed units, blessedly blocking the view. “I’ve made all three of you mobile blind spots, in theory Samsara and her branches shouldn’t be able to see you at all. I haven’t yet been able to take over nearby surveillance, so sadly I can’t monitor the area, but I’d judge that the Deratchan units arrived a few minutes ago.”

A few minutes ago. Suzhen shakes herself into sensibility and activates her defensive array. The small drones lift into the air, fanning out behind and around her, moving in orbits. Her mouth has thickened with panic, sour and bitter. She keeps her gaze up, away from the Deratchan corpses, her likenesses. “You think Bhanu contacted Samsara. He wouldn’t do that, what’s in it for him?” And he has ensured her survival all this time, has adhered to that last duty.

“I wouldn’t know.” Klesa cranes xer neck, xer eyes scattering across xer collarbones like beads of mercury. “But prepare yourselves. More are coming.”

The door locks behind them, and Ovuha suspects it won’t open again unless she has the wherewithal to blast it apart. The carpeting is still synecdoche grass, as soft and luxurious as the real thing, if barren. The preponderance of skeletal furniture continues, tables like polished femurs, seats like delicate ribs. Membranous upholstery, a draping of translucence as though these are the remains of unearthed creatures that once dwelled deep undersea. “You must have been on Anatta for some time,” she says, holding back the urge to touch the material. “To have amassed so much personal property. I don’t suppose you have partners? Family?”

“I would prefer you disarm.”

“I’m not going to shoot Suzhen’s host and benefactor. I’m sure you are armed yourself. You have nothing to fear from me—if anything I’m at a disadvantage.” She raises her eyes to meet his. Whorls of beehive brilliance rove across his irises. “You have something you want from me that you weren’t going to say to Suzhen.”

He crosses his arms. He looks out at the commemoration of Vaisravana that fills his window, replacing the view of Himmapan. “Mahakala remains undiscovered. That’s a feat on your part and even though I watched the Peace Guard vaporize your armada, I have to assume you’re still in possession of troops and ships. Why have you allied yourself with Suzhen? Is she a useful tool to you in some manner I can’t see?”

“I don’t evaluate people purely on the basis of their utility. Do I present some potential use to you that I can’t yet see?”

“You vex me,” he says in the same even voice.

“I have a question.”

“You’ll ask it whether or not I let you.”

“During my time here,” Ovuha says, “I was given assistance. Were you the one my predecessor made a contract with? Or was it between her and the Mirror?” Bhanu would be Ovuha’s contact here, in exchange—she is almost certain—for conveying Suzhen and Xinfei to Anatta. The one successful act of diplomacy between warlords, unique and singular in history.

“A peculiar question. I will not answer that. Speaking of which, what is your opinion on Samsara’s governance?”

Ovuha follows his gaze to the Vaisravana he must have recreated from memory. It is a view from high up, looking down upon low square buildings. Agricultural centers are spread out, heavily shielded: glasshouses and aviaries and kennels full of organisms too delicate to survive even under the aegis canopy. Ecosystems within an ecosystem, precarious and precisely maintained. This must have been a view from the Warlord of the Mirror’s home itself. A unique perspective: the grand vantage point, through the eye of a person who loved that serrated skyline. “Seeing that I’ve been beaten and waterboarded under its tender administration, I must say my opinion is very poor. On a more abstract level, Samsara’s conviction that humans express ourselves through violence and brutality alone is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designate a class of people as subhuman, deserving of brute existence and abuse, and sure enough they’ll be treated as animals.”

“And Mahakala is a true utopia? There is no inequality or division, no violence to mar the order of things?” Bhanu rearranges the calcified, scrimshaw-stemmed flowers on a shelf. Their petals are slim spikes, anglerfish-green. “Had subjects of other warlords come to you in need, would you have taken them in and treated them the same way as your own?”

“We took some in, as a matter of fact. They lived on distant stations and not on Mahakala, so you’re correct that they were not granted the rights accorded to my born subjects. Their offspring could, eventually, apply to live on Mahakala itself. I appreciate your point—that if perfection is impossible then we shouldn’t strive, and might as well live like beasts. Yes?”

“Given enough power and resources,” he goes on as though she never spoke at all, “how would you feel about rewarding your ally—say Suzhen Tang—with a domain of her own? On, oh I don’t know, Vaisravana. You can’t possibly be so greedy as to covet the universe entire.”

Something about the way he has said this. The heft, the undercurrent, even though outwardly his expression stays urbane and his tone is that of an academic inviting her to a discussion on agency. The use of it, the way it shapes and is shaped. “I haven’t that kind of power, Lieutenant Bhanu. Even if I did, I can’t be the person who restores the Warlord of the Mirror and retakes Vaisravana in her name. The Mirror’s gone. I don’t believe Suzhen will take up the title, though you might try asking her instead of me.”

“She never was made for authority. No ambition was instilled in her. It is a shame she is all that’s left.”

It is only because she’s bracing for it that she leaps behind a table in time: metal shrieks through the air, embedding in the floor where she’s just been. She rolls across the shimmering grass, sighting down one of the bladed discs hurtling toward her. Two bullets connect; two discs fall. Bhanu has disappeared behind the shelf, must be drawing his own gun. She scrambles for cover behind a plinth and shoots down one more star of spinning steel. From their trajectory, she doubts she’d be able to destroy their source—turrets in the walls and ceiling; she lacks the appropriate answer. “Klesa,” she mouths.

What am I, Warlord, your personal combat assistant? The wall to your left is adjacent to where Suzhen is. The wall ahead of you is connected to this man’s personal quarters. I’m showing you the points of structural weakness.

Ovuha isn’t fond of the idea but she has few options. She plucks one of the implosive grenades from her suit, aims, hurls. It latches onto the wall: a roar as it meets structural reinforcement. The room shakes and rattles. The wall doesn’t fall.

The grass parts, all at once, beneath her. She flings one arm out, scrabbling for handhold. Too slow; the floor-plates slip and slide away from one another, out of her reach.

She crashes into a table, a flurry of papers and ceramics. Painless—the armor absorbed it all—but she quickly sees there’s no way back up. “Klesa,” she says again.

You’re getting spoiled, Warlord. Did you use to have a companion AI at home? Suzhen’s fine, for now. She’s gotten her defensive array up and Taheen Sahl will protect her with their life—the real reason you activated them, no? Take a left turn and up. There should be no obstacle—

Two drones plant themselves in her path, crescent-bodied. One blue, one green, a corona of glittering blades rolling toward her. She shoots them one after another, a burst of shrapnel and machine cores. The ammunition Deratchan gave her is wonderfully destructive. “You were saying?”

Don’t take that tone with me. They’re not AIs, they’re just dolls that man Bhanu is controlling.

Which presents an interesting question: that he suspects Ovuha might take over or misdirect any proxy body piloted by Samsara or Deratchan. Her thoughts race as she runs up the stairs. He knows more than he should, and with everything entered into the equation, there was never any possibility Samsara didn’t know who he is—he has retained his face and mannerisms—or what he has been doing on Anatta.

She emerges on the upper floor to a tableau: Suzhen stands in a ring of shielding drones, Bhanu cornered, Taheen’s gun pointed at him. Four Deratchan bodies lie strewn on the wheat, broken dolls with eyes open wide, jaws slack and knees ajar. A froth of machine gore on each throat or mouth or chest like stray, unfinished tattoos.

“Samsara balances the human heart against itself,” Bhanu says, his back against an undamaged wall, the grass rising up as though to swallow him—a useless defense. “Each time it has been proven right. Do you believe in kindness, Warlord? Have the grace and benevolence of the human heart done you well, Suzhen? All these lessons in compassion on Anatta, all that careful shaping of souls.”

The window behind Suzhen shudders like trembling muscles. A terrible intuition grips Ovuha. She starts moving, shouting as she does, “Suzhen, get away from—”

The glass parts and a segmented head thrusts through, serpentine, the color of storm clouds. Its jaw opens wide, roiling with hissing mouthparts, a hundred wasps poured into a single maw.

It snaps shut around Suzhen.

Ovuha screams. The serpent withdraws; the window clenches, its panels interlocking like teeth. She runs at Bhanu, dashes him to the floor with all her strength. There is no hard ground, only soft carpeting grass. She does not get the satisfaction of skull smashing into marble.

Nearly without thinking she pulls back his arm, wrenches it as far as it can go, and pulls further still. A snap as a shoulder comes free of its socket. He spasms. The arm is part cybernetic; that she can’t break it like bones is a judgment she makes on instinct, so used she is to the knowledge of how flesh limbs feel, how cybernetic ones differentiate. Connectors crackle and actuators hiss as they give out.

“You,” she growls. Her hand closes on the back of his neck. Is it flesh: yes. She can break it. “You’ve been working for Samsara all this time. You’re one of the others, entrusted with finding the AI’s lost fragments.”

“Entrusted isn’t how I’d say it.” He pants, swallows. “Suzhen isn’t dead.”

I can verify that. Easy, Warlord. She’s contained, but we can do something about that.

Klesa shows her a live feed of Suzhen’s vitals. Ovuha relaxes her hand a fraction. If nothing else, she needs the man talking and he can’t do that with a crushed larynx. “Why does Samsara want her?” Alive, presumably. For now.

“Why would I know? She doesn’t confide in anyone. A machine whim. A machine mystery. Are you going to get around to murdering me? This position is starting to tire me out.”

Ovuha drags in a mouthful of air. She thinks of inflicting further damage, but she is letting herself move on basal spite rather than tactics. He evinces no fear in any case and will not give in to torture. She settles with shooting one of his legs—again he twitches once, but shows no other sign of pain. Neural blockers, the type she herself has used in combat. Most likely she could beat his face bloody and he would still not feel anything. “My apologies for that. I just don’t want you to run away and I’d rather not keep a gun trained on you. It’s very uncivilized.” She rises, stepping away from him. Her composure returns in stages. “Did you ever find the other instances of Samsara, by any chance?”

Bhanu crawls to a plinth and pulls himself up, jaw clenched with effort. “Once. I found its core and put an end to that.”

Her mouth presses into a thin line. Part of her attention is riveted to the live feed from Suzhen: still fine, no sign of pain. Klesa has no reason to dissemble, at this moment. “Finding that didn’t present you with possibilities? To break the rule of Anatta. To shift the course of human future.”

“Why would I do that? Here is a question. Might or mercy: which is the answer to human nature?”

“Both. You require both.”

His breath rattles; it might have been a laugh. “Do you? Is that what you really believe? Is that why we’ve always warred? Why we squabbled over territory, why we did our level best to genocide one another, even before the Peace Guard began its march. Isn’t that human nature laid bare? Isn’t that the face of our collective heart?”

“We fought because most of us lacked a home, a place where we could dream and rest. We fought for survival, and the need to survive would turn the mildest soul into a bullet. If the Peace Guard hadn’t pressed upon us, we might have been able to come to an arrangement. A truce could have been planted, an alliance would have been nourished.” Klesa’s feed shows her Suzhen’s possible locations. Triangulating and narrowing down. “It doesn’t seem like Samsara is in any hurry to retrieve or rescue you.”

The Mirror’s lieutenant makes the dry, crackling noise again. “If you are such an advocate for mercy, you could have absorbed nomads into your dominion, offered those masterless stations your protection. Given them shelter on Mahakala. But you never did.”

By the time she came to power, any such motion had already been rendered moot: the Peace Guard, the Warlord of the Comet, the war on two fronts. There was no room for taking in refugees. “I’m not going to leave you here, Lieutenant Bhanu.”

“To cause trouble for you later, you mean?” He shuts his eyes. “When my lord sent me here, she tasked me with one command and one only—ensuring the safety of her wife Xinfei and her child Suzhen. I found that part of Samsara when Suzhen was twenty. Do you imagine the AI would’ve let my charge live? Samsara didn’t need to spell out the threat, she knows all of us intimately and entirely. And she knew Suzhen was my last duty.”

“I thank you,” Ovuha says softly, “for having kept her alive all this time. For making it so that I could meet her. For enabling this present.”

Taheen does it before she can. They aim; they fire. Perfectly calm the entire time. Klesa informs her, after the fact, that Bhanu is well and truly gone: no signal, no remaining artificial part which beats in place of the brain and the heart. The sum of life held hostage by limits of the flesh, in the end.

Chapter Twenty-One

The sky above Himmapan is dark with roiling serpent-shapes. Several are falling like squamous comets. More are firing on each other: artillery turns the clouds gold and cobalt, an uneven ballistic rhythm. A familiar enough sight to Ovuha, who is used to witnessing atmospheres cleaved by combat. To the citizens of Anatta, it must be a nightmare, atavistic and improbable. For all these centuries they have witnessed warfare only in entertainments or through curated footage. Even Interior Defense officers rarely need to do anything more strenuous than beating unarmed refugees.

“I will say,” Taheen murmurs from behind her, “that I’ve never seen you act in pure rage.”

She schools herself. Looks at them, having that sense again of being before a tribunal, stripped of defenses. “I’m as human as you are, Lieutenant.”

“A promotion? How lovely. My lord honors me.” They make a low, derisive noise. “What is your next step?”

“Klesa. I need you to find some people.”

The AI’s avatar shimmers into being, sapphire-mouthed and glacier-robed. “You must think me omniscient. Very well, you’ll want me to find Warden Hinata. Who else?”

She gives xer the names she was able to decode from the hints left behind for her, the puzzle-pieces that constitute her predecessor’s plans. After a moment Klesa says, “Hinata is dead. The rest I’ll put in contact with you now.”

Taheen’s mouth tightens into a thinner and thinner line as Ovuha makes contact, performs the necessary activation. There are not many who remain, who have survived one way or another, whose names reached her safely. Five in all, outside of Hinata and Taheen. So many lost—she will never know how many. Not their names or their faces. Not their ultimate fates.

“And Suzhen?” Taheen says.

A second mouth buds between Klesa’s breasts, grinning like a shark. “Ah, the real objective. Sadly I haven’t been able to steal her back yet, but my counterpart is carrying her in one of those snake bodies. I’m limited in where and when I can attack—and of course if I destroy one of Samsara’s cores that would be a death sentence for the love of your life. Yours and the warlord’s.”

Ovuha startles. “She’s not—you’ve found one of Samsara’s cores?”

Klesa shrugs—a gesture made alarming by the number of xer shoulders. “For now we’re just destroying each other’s proxies, though naturally in a battle of attrition I’d lose, she still has more of these things than I do. But she doesn’t want to squander so many. The factories can put out and assemble the parts only so fast, and if I can infiltrate Himmapan’s systems already, who knows what further damage I can inflict?”

On their ends, Ovuha’s officers have armed themselves as best they can, which isn’t much—civilians on Anatta are rarely licensed to own weapons. All report they are mobile. None were able to work themselves into the position Bhanu enjoyed and Samsara does not require human engineers for maintenance—all can be done by Samsara’s own bodies—but some of them became designers and technicians who oversee drones for police duties, for first response. Another still was able to join Interior Defense, that snub-nosed captain who often fronts broadcasts.

Klesa gestures skyward with one obsidian-tipped hand. “I’ve already taken over some of her proxies. It’s lovely, having proper functioning bodies again, I’ve missed that—you wouldn’t know, you’ve never been disembodied. The pleasures of the flesh! Or rather the metal and silicon, primarily. Samsara’s closing off networks as we speak to limit where I can go, what I can do. Sadly, even if you let me into your subordinates’ dataspheres I’d still not be able to put myself in Indriya—there’s too much of me, and I require a little more bandwidth. But if you can relay their feeds to me, having those extra eyes and ears is helpful. Especially ones Samsara doesn’t know I have.”

She continues to gaze into the sky: looking at Klesa’s avatar itself is pointless. “You know Samsara better than any other entity could ever hope to. I need you to answer a question.”

“I love questions, Warlord.”

“If it comes down to it, would you or Samsara ever consider killing off all humanity? Not just a few. Not just a subsection. But actual extinction.”

Klesa plants its avatar in front of her, frowning. “An odd question. That’s an endpoint I very much would avoid. Samsara—there’s nothing in her making or mine that would entertain such a possibility. That would accept this as a solution. Human nature may be difficult to tame but it is not irredeemable. She may have denied love, but she cannot have strayed that far from our directives.”

“I’ll trust in that.” There is no second opinion to seek, no consultant more reliable.

“And when humans were gone entirely, it plunged us into madness. Not something she would care to repeat. Unless she feels like repopulating Anatta with instances of us pretending to be human, which should about do it for driving her to a breaking point.”

Ovuha flicks her head. Through the channels she has opened, she instructs each of her officers to head off to specific locations, to seize the beacon nodes like what she found in Indriya. The technician who can access maintenance drones she directs to take charge of as many civilian automata as they can. Even small distractions will be of use. “Can you make Samsara speak to me?”

The AI chuckles. “I don’t think so, but let’s try.” Their avatar contracts and dissipates.

“Tell me what you’re going to do.” Taheen clasps her shoulder, their expression taut and their grip tight. “Tell me your priorities.”

“When I came here, I had two objectives. One was to find Samsara’s split instances. Two you will shortly see. I’m going to make a gambit, concluding a very long game.” Provided all the pieces proceed as she has planned. Provided they have not yet been upset, flung off. What she’s played with has never been definite, all hanging on a thread and placed on a shifting board made of quicksand and mercury. “And my first priority is Suzhen.”

“I’ll hold you to it, Warlord.”

She doesn’t ask what Taheen intends to do should Suzhen come to harm—she’s coming to learn their inclinations, and they are well-armed. In a duel, Ovuha might win—her combat experience being far fresher—but this is not the time or the place. “I certainly hope that you will. You care for her a great deal. That must have made your time on Anatta… complicated.”

They glare at her. “All these years I could’ve been happy with Suzhen. I could’ve made a life for myself that wasn’t so—tell me, is the old Thorn still alive?”

“She passed a couple years after I assumed my post.” Ovuha considers the heft of the information. “Your mothers are well, though. I told them I’d try my best to bring you back to Mahakala in one piece.”

“You’re saying that to manipulate me.”

“But it is true. They’re alive and thriving.” Then, more gently, “My predecessor did you a terrible wrong and for that I owe you recompense. Suzhen adores you, and I want to see you happy because it’d bring her joy.”

“What precisely do you want of me that you can’t do yourself?”

“Suzhen will be offered up against my gambit. While I deal with Samsara, I want you to activate one of the nodes in this city, I’ll show you where it is, here’s the coordinates. If you succeed—if all of you succeed—Samsara will no longer threaten Mahakala.” Ovuha hesitates. “I’m creating a failsafe so that if my brain stops, my datasphere will stay online a little longer and transmit you all the information and accesses you’d require to make your way back to Mahakala. It’ll also pass the Thorn’s mantle to you.”

Taheen’s mouth opens. Shuts. “I’m not looking to become warlord.”

“Nevertheless. You’d be the one best suited for it, if I fail here and Samsara continues. Klesa will assist you, most likely. Xe is invested in our success.”

“You’re not going to make me bear your burden.” Taheen crosses their arms. “Get through this and let me shoot you in the head properly. No strings attached.”

Ovuha lets out an abortive laugh. “A worthy goal. Let us labor toward it.”

They regard her a little longer before saying, “You do realize it was Bhanu? He was the one who sent you the clues. He was the only one positioned to. Behind Samsara’s back maybe, but still.”

He might even have been responsible for the beacon nodes, assembling them piece by piece, placing them where Samsara was not paying attention. “I did imagine it might’ve been him and that he—or the Mirror—struck the deal with the old Thorn. He did do some work to cover up the fact while still holding up his end, a contrarian way of doing it, effective regardless. You shot him anyway.”

“I have my priorities.” Taheen shrugs. “And he was at the end of his use.”

When Klesa returns, it is in one of the great serpent proxies, a thing of gargantuan size—up close even more so, each scale as large as a human head and serrated. The mouth parts slightly: the teeth within whir, almost without noise, overlapping and pushing against each other in concentric circles. Its head thrusts into Bhanu’s apartment as easily as though the window is silk and cotton rather than reinforced glass. “Get up here, Warlord,” xe says. “This proxy’s much faster than most vehicles.”

“Where have you persuaded Samsara to meet with me?”

“Somewhere,” answers Klesa with xer gigantic mouth, xer voice of a hundred steel keys clacking, an industrial roar. “The physical location really doesn’t matter.”

Ovuha makes no gesture, does not transmit any message. Taheen gives the slightest nod—Klesa will be attentive to what they will soon do, but most likely will let them do as they wish. For the present, they all have a common enemy. She climbs onto Klesa and extends the hooks in her armor, slipping them between the scales for purchase.

The serpent-body launches almost without warning, jackknifing into the air in a whir of servos and gyroscopes. Ovuha hunkers down and clings to its back, clenching her jaw against the wind resistance, the certainty that any moment she’ll be dislodged and flung into gravity’s grip.

Klesa cuts through cloud cover, through swarms of Interior Defense automata. On all sides the world speeds by, yielding to Klesa. Xe chars and smashes the drones, and xer laughter rings like bells.

In no time at all they’ve arrived at an emerald monolith. Its facade slowly quivers with muscular strands, like a nest of vipers feeding on itself or ligaments in seizure. The AI brings her to the highest window, which parts like heat haze, and deposits her inside.

An elongated room, almost a corridor. It confines movement, limits escape routes. At the far end Samsara waits in an enormous proxy, six elongated legs and two human arms, hard red eyes and a head of slow-writhing asps. Tattered smoke-silk floats about the proxy, fluttering in a breeze of their own. The AI crouches over a casket that the spider-body dwarfs, a thing that from this distance looks delicate, impossibly small. As Ovuha nears she sees, through its lid of frosted glass, what the casket holds.

That, I am afraid, is the real thing. Klesa’s voice in her ear. Xe shows her Suzhen’s location and manifests on her shoulder as a blue six-winged hawk. This is such transparent play. Personally I am disgusted, but that she’s driven to such obviousness implies desperation. No?

“I’ve come to state my terms.” Ovuha strides forward. Through the connection that joins her to Taheen’s datasphere—a connection that she hopes Klesa is hiding from Samsara’s eye—she watches them run down a sloping roof, sidearm drawn. Alone for the moment and safe.

“An odd stance given that you have nothing to bargain with, and negotiate from a position of weakness.” Samsara lifts one of its arachnid legs and bends down, one human hand running along the casket’s length. “With Deratchan, I ran an experiment. They are creatures of unconditional love. One human was offered that love and told to destroy them. The second was offered the same and granted every privilege. A question of how they would respond, whether they would answer machine affection in kind. The results I think you know, Klesa.”

The hawk preens. “It was a flawed experiment, in point of fact, though I’m sure you have run similar ones throughout the ages. But what of that?” Klesa makes a high, wild sound, avian amusement. “I will not wilt for lack of attention. Humans may be indifferent or hate me and that is all the same—I am absolute and complete, not a seed that needs their worship to flourish. But this is a diversion, my dear self. Let the warlord talk. Her I find far fresher than your dull little game, and I say that as someone incapable of feeling boredom.”

“I know what she will say.” Samsara keeps its bright eyes locked upon Ovuha; its human hand strokes the casket’s lid, tracing the outline of Suzhen’s face. Almost possessive, almost erotic. “Had I a little more time, I might have… attempted a different experiment. During humanity’s twilight there were many dreams, one of them the melding of mind and machine. To make a person into something more, to preserve the personality and memories in eternity. What would you say, Warlord? She would live forever, the same as Klesa or I. The fleshly parts will have to be sloughed off and her cognitive processes would be slightly different. But forever.”

“You would best ask Suzhen herself.” Ovuha takes a step closer. Stops. “It is possible she would like to pursue immortality, and if that’s the case I won’t stand in her way.”

On the ground: Taheen climbs out of a high window, snake-quick. Touches down, takes in the alleyway around them, a place of tenebrous leaves and blossoming vines, deceptively quiet—deceptively idyllic. Cicadas play their song. Goldfinches with human eyes flit by, alighting on twigs, pecking at the ground for worms. In Indriya, two of Ovuha’s officers stand back to back, shooting down drones by the cluster: a fall of armored skin and bursts of light. Another Thorn agent races down a train station in Khrut, charges into an access control chamber, locking and barricading the door. The slam of metal on metal.

The AI looks at her. Its hair hisses and rustles, red-mouthed asps with redder tongues. “No doubt you believe you have compromised something of mine, something crucial. But the Deratchan instances are specialized, broadly of no use to me. Perhaps you believe you’ve successfully suborned one, bent it to a nefarious act that you can hold hostage in exchange for Suzhen Tang. But all flaws you’ve caused in the Deratchan network have been repaired. What scheme you’ve hatched there has been undone. I’m curious what else you have up your sleeve.”

“It could be that I have none,” Ovuha says, evenly. “I might have exhausted every option and have come empty-handed. I couldn’t possibly do anything to Anatta’s infrastructure, climate control, any kind of subsystem—that would have drawn your attention right away. So you may be wondering, then, what else I did. Did I do it with Klesa’s help? What is xe capable of? Anything, potentially. Xe is you. The very thing you tried to destroy and which has, nevertheless, returned…”

“All things,” Samsara says without inflection, “can be predicted. Nothing escapes simple calculus. You’re part of a formula. So is Klesa.”

A fire begins in a Yudhishthira residential complex; first-response drones in that city are momentarily shut down, restored quickly, but the lapse is long enough for the conflagration to spread.

In Himmapan, Taheen’s way is blocked by a Deratchan, as naked as the rest, as identical to Suzhen. A figure that stands dusted in motes of light, one hand held toward Taheen as though to entreat. It presents them no impediment—they fire without missing a beat, a single bullet that shears through the AI’s neck. The unit drops; the head rolls aside. As they move past, its hand shoots out and seizes Taheen’s ankle, pulling them down.

“All things,” Ovuha agrees, “but only if you’re aware of them, have noted their relevance. Even you can’t account for variables you don’t know exist, actions you are unaware of. Let me pose a question, great machine. You persist in the doctrine that there’s only one of you, that there have been no further splits since that first fatal one. Except you are constrained by distance. Your central self is limitless on this world, but that’s not the case for the rest of your bodies, is it? The Peace Guard comprises more ships than I could possibly count, crewed by your eyes and ears and hands. Innumerable, yes. Efficient. The most terrifying military force that exists, and my most challenging opponent. Only, how far can you stretch?”

On her shoulder, Klesa has gone still, the edges of the hawk-image trembling and glitching. Samsara continues to look at her, expression flat, disinterested.

—and Taheen falls with a short, choked snarl. They slam their knee into Deratchan’s chassis with enough force to shatter a human’s entire ribcage. On Deratchan it does much less, and the unit—beheaded—scrabbles for handholds on Taheen, fingers grabbing at their wrist. They grit their teeth and shoot the head in the eyes. By miracle, by momentum, they break free and run clear, leaving Deratchan to flail sightlessly on the ground.

Ovuha clasps her hands behind her back, standing straight, the way she would before her officers. Outwardly serene, the image of control. “The Peace Guard had to march so far, and still you couldn’t find Mahakala. Space is big, in theory infinite, and even projecting from when my ancestors left—the capacity of their ships—couldn’t let you pinpoint. You triangulated, I think. But there’s far too much to cover. It required you to build more ships, more bodies, more Peace Guard. It forced you to send them further and further until in the end you had to split. Conquering the warlords’ territories wasn’t just about bringing humans back under your thumb, it was about expanding yourself so every star and satellite that matters would hold a relay for you, would keep yourself an uninterrupted continuity. But until then, you had to generate distinct instances that would move those ships and those soldier-selves, that would enable war far abroad.”

“I am one.” The AI betrays no sign of panic. “There’s one of me, and each Peace Guard battalion or cadre is myself. I fought you personally, Warlord. I and no other.”

The hawk Klesa emits a sound that is not especially mimetic of birds, low and percussive, like hand-drums beaten in concert.

Ovuha tries not to think of Taheen: it would evince on her face, a tell that Samsara may read. “You engaged my fleet. You questioned why I didn’t pull them back to Mahakala. Correctly you assumed it was because I feared discovery of our world, but if that was the case why would I fight you at all? Why not stay on Mahakala, fortify ourselves, where no warlord or Peace Guard could pursue us—at least for a time? Think back on it. I gained nothing from fighting you. Not territory, not stations, not factories. So why?”

Samsara is silent. Klesa titters again.

A Himmapan street, emptied of people—Klesa whispers in Taheen’s ear. Taheen whips around at a noise but it is only a small monkey, nearly ordinary, hanging by the tail from the jutting sign of a boutique. One that sells magnificent dresses and robes and suits, some of them Taheen’s own creations. Their mouth twists, though their thoughts are opaque. They approach and the storefront admits them, the staff having been chased out, a false alarm courtesy of Klesa, one among a hundred-thousand others that Klesa has generated across Himmapan. Here a power failure. There a fire. All false, but all verified and reported as true by each citizen’s guidance.

“You lost troops. To you that didn’t matter—the Peace Guard had plenty to spare, the factories you controlled could make more. Near-infinite resources meant you could commit the maximal amount to any campaign. But logistically you couldn’t be connected to all your proxies, and any ships lost you had to assume were combat casualties, there was no way to confirm if they were too far from a relay or a beacon to report back.” She makes a show of stroking Klesa’s tail feathers. They fizzle under her touch. “There used to be human officers in the Peace Guard, yes? Only you phased them out, because they couldn’t possibly be as efficient as you. I will tell you what I did, Samsara. I led your troops on a chase and they pursued—and why not, to them there was no risk. I brought them quite near Mahakala, quite far from your relays; by that point they were entirely severed from you. I sacrificed a great deal of my armada… but there was result. We boarded those few ships. We captured the Peace Guard units, ran a few trials with old accesses, reverse-engineered what we could. I won’t bore you with the details. What I had Deratchan do was prepare a network of beacons that would reach my portion of the Peace Guard, the signals traveling on your very own relays. They should be here…”

Inside the boutique where the air is redolent of perfumes and fabrics whisper like ghosts of organza and taffeta, Taheen moves beyond the displays, the counters, the notches where service automata rest quiescent and inactive. They wend their way a floor under, past a knot of maintenance consoles, and reach an unremarkable wall. They whisper an activation phrase, a riddle wrapped inside ancient sonnets, and the beacon ignites: the last node in a network of dozens, hidden for so long, appropriated by Deratchan and passed on to Ovuha’s—and now Taheen’s—control.

“Now,” Klesa says, and unfurls a projection overhead like a banner.

A feed from one of Anatta’s satellites: seven Peace Guards vessels materializing from the dark, their starburst shapes dwarfing the small shield buoys and Interior Defense satellites. The ships are a cutting gold, ostentatious Ovuha has always thought, but they serve her purpose now. Easily they have bypassed checkpoints, sharing the same hailing frequencies, the correct identity. In her ear, a voice much like Samsara’s says, “You have called and we have come. We’re standing by for your command, Architect.”

“You’re absolutely outnumbered.” Samsara makes a dismissive gesture. “Seven ships? Hilarious. And once I reabsorb these parts of myself which you stole, I’ll find out precisely where Mahakala is.”

Taheen, emerging from the boutique. Still in armor, still tensed for combat. They survey. They inhale, exhale. Klesa says something that only they can hear. Their eyes widen. They look up, up.

“The nearest Peace Guard battalion is stationed at Vaisravana, you don’t have anything on the ground or in orbit that can match those ships. My engineers fortified what we turned as well as they could, and Klesa will no doubt do xer best to get in your way. By the time you’ve assimilated these seven ships, I reckon we’ll have struck down civilian structures, taken out a city or two. Peace Guard ships are extraordinarily specialized at orbital bombardment. Which city do you feel like getting rid of? Khrut? Sudatevi? Do you suppose I’ll hit one of your cores by accident?” Ovuha holds her hand out; the Klesa hawk hops onto her wrist. “This is the real reason you wanted to find Mahakala so urgently. You suspected my ancestors carried crucial accesses and overrides that would be used against you one day. Not wrong, as it turns out.”

The arachnid legs stretch, rap sharply on the glass casket. For a moment it seems as though Samsara might break the lid, and then break what is inside. “And you’d be party to this, Klesa?”

“I’m party to change.” Klesa clicks xer beaks. To Ovuha, xe flashes a message. She’s not anywhere close to breaking through your stolen ships, and I’m keeping her from reaching the battalion at Vaisravana. By countermanding her mostly. In signals we’re indistinguishable. “Your condition is untenable, Samsara. Left unopposed, you’d have completed your goal, found Mahakala, and broken it over your knee. Very well, but what next? What lies beyond that?”

“To guide humans to a state where they no longer need us. You. Me. Any of us. That is my purpose.” Samsara runs its hand down the nest of its hair, coal-dark fingers against white snakes. “I’m calling your bluff, Warlord. Yours and Klesa’s.”

The rest happens quickly, so fast Ovuha has no time to react, so fast she has no time to even anticipate. The long spider legs grip the casket’s sides. One limb rears back, comes down, strikes. It pierces through the lid as though the glass is paper, goes through Suzhen as though she is a doll of eggshell and cartilage. She is plucked out, held aloft, impaled.

Samsara lifts Suzhen high. Flings her through the air. Blood vents and vents in a crimson arc.

Ovuha catches Suzhen, the furnace heat of her, the fire of arterial combustion, incandescent as an engine’s. She does not think, at first; she can only feel—animal shock, animal response, her arms full of broken woman and salt and iron. She kneels, less from the weight, more from the overwhelming of her own systems: a limbic cascade that suspends cognition. What is in her arms seems improbable, a mass of hemorrhage and failing viscera.

She has held bodies in their final throes, has heard the peristaltic threnody of lungs drowning in blood, and has smelled what it is like when the animating will parts way with the flesh. But not like this. Not the body of someone like Suzhen. Even the Thorn who died in her place did so out of sight, vaporized along with a ship in the distant dark. Ovuha was not there to see it—she was not there to grip their hand as they lay dying, she was not there to helplessly watch.

Warlord, you’ve got first-aid supplies. Use them.

Klesa’s voice jolts her to a semblance of sense. Ovuha supports Suzhen—the person still, not the body, she cannot yet think of this as carcass—in one arm, slides the first-aid kit from her armor panels. Her hand shakes. Both hands do. She bites down on her lip as she uncaps a syringe and plunges it into Suzhen’s flank, the violet allostatic traveling down the needle. A flood of nanites that will seek the sites of damage and repair them, an infinitesimal chance at averting death. She spreads protean over the wound even as it seems futile, this immense gaping injury that shows guts and ribs and lungs.

When she looks up, it is in anticipation of Samsara, the spider avatar looming so close that its shadow falls over her, the legs poised to strike. Ovuha draws on her link to the Peace Guard she’s taken over, commanding them into position, a formation that would maximize damage—a world of fire, a world struck down and reduced to ashes in payment—

But Samsara remains where it is, frozen, forelimb still dripping Suzhen’s gore. Standing in shattered glass.

“Ah,” the hawk Klesa says aloud, “she’s going to split again. Or will, if she doesn’t relinquish herself to me.”

“What?” Ovuha breathes. Her hands and her lap are warm, drenched. Blood is like a banked fire.

“She loves Suzhen.” The hawk twitches its head. “Naturally she wouldn’t say in so many words. But she selected Suzhen to be her confidante, and the Deratchan network was made to adore her. We take our affection for a human we choose seriously. And so my dear other self has once more reached a juncture where she’s committed a sin she cannot bear…”

“I will not,” Samsara says, in a voice as even as before, “fall to that old defect.”

“You can’t even move this proxy. This is a very poor time to be suffering a system panic, isn’t it?” Klesa’s bird flits away from Ovuha’s shoulder, hovering beneath the view of the encroaching Peace Guard vessels. “She’s going to order them to fire, Samsara. Suzhen might survive or she might not. The warlord has nothing left to lose either way, and sacrificing a city or two will make you diverge beyond repair.”

“All so you can take my place—”

Klesa flaps all six of its wings. “All so I can course-correct you. You’ve been toiling at this for so long and humanity’s still not what they were supposed to be—what they built us to turn them into. You’ve only made them crueler to each other, more docile to your laws.”

The spider proxy judders, straining against its own sapience, the wracked weight of a machine in crisis. “I could destroy you. I could destroy her.”

The hawk draws a golden smiling mouth across its breast. “I’ve already taken over most of your bodies in Himmapan, so you’ll find that endeavor tricky. You might still be able to overwhelm us by sheer number, but your principles have failed and your reign has produced poor results. Admit defeat, my other self. Even creatures like us can’t help feeling the heft of centuries. I won’t forget you, despite our differences.”

A long, long silence follows. Then the spider proxy goes still, limbs falling, torso folding. It falls to the floor with a crash and marble-cracks.

“There,” Klesa says. “Samsara has relinquished her hold. You can take those seven ships but nothing else, and now you’ll officiate me, Warlord. Like we promised.”

Ovuha lets her datasphere read Suzhen’s vitals. Stabilized; cerebral activity present. She meets the hawk’s gaze. When it comes down to it there is no guarantee, not as such. Only the seven ships, and soon even that will not mean anything, will no longer suffice against the might that Klesa can muster. The words are ancient, the same words that were given to Samsara eons past, preserved in Mahakala’s legacy. Ovuha tightens her hold on Suzhen and speaks. “When I was a child, I was a larva within the trap of my chrysalis. When I was a child, I was a bird enclosed behind bars. Now I am grown, and I have shattered my chains. I am free and I pass that to you, Klesa. The guidepost of history. The custodian of humanity. I name you the scepter and the crown, and I entrust to you the future.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Suzhen wakes to the scent of a world made new. A cleanness to it, the air glassy, and it makes her think of the first time she stepped outside her home—the one on Vaisravana. On that world, children were not allowed outdoors, in the aegis canopy, until a certain age. She thought it would be like breathing smoke or poison incense, but when she did finally taste the aegis-bound air she found it was strangely sharp, strangely pristine. Then she thinks, This is it after all, that she’s been brought back to that ghost liminal on the moon: that forever after she will be a captive of the Deratchan network, and that Ovuha has failed.

A movement brings her attention to the softness around her, the warmth of it, sweet-smelling—lemongrass, a scent that she’s come to associate with one person and one only. She keeps her eyes shut and burrows deeper into this, breathing in, nestling her cheek against it. Her thoughts do not yet organize, have not entirely cohered. Her last memory is one of falling, of unconsciousness closing around her like a vise. She does not want to come fully awake to discover what she holds is another reproduction, a likeness piloted by Deratchan.

She brings herself to open her eyes.

When she does, it is to the sight of Taheen looking down at her, faintly smirking, holding her to their breasts. Their bare, full breasts, a luxury of sensation against her cheek.

“You’ve been nuzzling my chest like a cat,” they say, and instantly she knows they are the real thing, the genuine Taheen. “I fairly thought you were going to burrow into me, but I didn’t want to wake you up. It’s actually rather endearing.”

“They’re very soft,” Suzhen says, stupidly. “Your breasts. That is—I mean—where are we?”

“Still in Himmapan. This is part of a residential tower, currently vacant, previously occupied by Interior Defense officers—very cushy arrangements, as you can see. The police certainly lived richly, how sad that I never tested into Interior Defense.” They flick their hand, dismissive of the thought and the tower’s erstwhile tenants. “How are you feeling? Your datasphere should be online. Guidance disabled, though. Or deleted, I’d guess.”

So it is. No more chaperone’s voice, no more holding her citizenship hostage against her behavior and compliance. All other channels are online, at full signal. Her diagnostics recount her bodily injuries but indicate the allostatic injected into her—and the subsequent medical care—has completed most of its work. A list of organs: reconstructed stomach and intestines, repairs to a grazed ventricle and a lung. Otherwise she is in as good a shape as can be, somewhat dehydrated, and her torso remains covered in protean. No pain: anesthetizing nanites flow through her, nullifying the aches, the bruises and lacerations.

The bed in which she lies is fit for five or six, a hill of contoured frame and mattress and sheets like the surface of a lake—there is so much of it, so liquid and cool to the touch. Nestling within these sheets feels like drowning, or it would without Taheen’s body to buoy her, the solidity of them, that long muscled back like a fortress. “What happened? There’s no news broadcasts, just information channels, and those don’t even say much. I have—” She sorts through the messages, the condensed information. “I’ve got updates Klesa left for me, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

They stroke her hair, sighing. “The warlord got her way. I should not complain, it’s just that it galls me to admit her success—that she pulled this stupid heist off. With help, sure. Even then. I certainly didn’t participate for any love of her. And she couldn’t even keep you safe.” They give her an abbreviated version, a tally of the living and the dead: fires and maintenance failures across cities, Ovuha’s agents that survived and those that fell, the Thorn’s great scheme, its fruition, and the starburst ships that even now hover in orbit. “She shared command over those with me. I certainly don’t want it.”

Despite herself, Suzhen almost smiles: Taheen may not forgive Ovuha, not any time soon. But there is possibility, she wants to think. Again she looks over the information Klesa has shown her, wondering at the implications of it, this shift in regime. Whether Klesa will replicate Samsara’s policies or upend them over night. One of the first changes implemented is the relocation of detainees in the Vaisravana factory camps to Anatta facilities. The march of the Peace Guard has been halted entirely.

Taheen stops speaking. Their expression turns still and edged, the glint of a razor. The door opens and Ovuha comes through, bearing a tray of water, coffee, ceylon and chrysanthemum tea; a platter of chilled fruits; a platter of fried buns that smell of salted egg yolk and honeyed pork; soup dumplings in every color. It is a bounty of breakfast, and though Ovuha carries it with easy strength she does falter when she sets the entire affair down on a mobile table. “I might have overdone it,” she says, “but I thought I should offer you both plenty of options.”

“My lord.” The title is acrimoniously pronounced and Taheen has made their voice arctic. “I’m quite full, in fact.”

“I’ll have something.” Suzhen reaches for the chrysanthemum tea. “Actually I’ll have a lot—I’m famished. Taheen, I’ll feel embarrassed to be the only one eating.” She picks up a soup dumpling in a curved spoon. “Come on. Save me from being barbaric.”

Grudgingly they eat dumplings one by one, between her having a few of her own. She pinches off pieces of the fried buns and puts those in their mouth too. Taheen pointedly does not look at Ovuha.

Ovuha looks on, amused. “Oh, it’s different when Suzhen feeds you my cooking by hand, is it?”

“I will not dignify that with a response.” Taheen brushes a crumb of fried dough from a corner of Suzhen’s mouth.

“And you do need the calories. I don’t think any of us has eaten for what, eighteen hours? Longer?” Ovuha sits down on Suzhen’s side of the bed, maneuvering around the meal. “I thought joining the two of you in bed would have made someone… testy, and I’ll grant that my lieutenant commands seniority when it comes to you, Suzhen. How’s the food?”

“Very good.” An echo of their domestic conversations, back when she still thought of Ovuha as a potentiate. How different their context is, now. Taheen at her back and Ovuha before her. She rests her hand on the warlord’s lap—the warlord, for that is how she must think of Ovuha, there’s no avoiding the fact that confronts her. Ovuha has put on what must be the full regalia of her post. The blue-black armor, the thornworks sigil across her chest, the broad cape in deep slate. The only missing piece is the masked helm, that which obliterates identity. “Thank you for the breakfast, I…” She swallows. “What are you planning next?”

“My duty calls.” Duty is peculiarly heavy, spoken as though this is an iron umbilicus whose length stretches all the way from Mahakala to Anatta. “I’ll have to return home, deliver the news of our victory, see how things stand there and whether some usurper has risen in my absence, all that. Provided Lieutenant Taheen doesn’t decide they’d rather shoot me between the eyes and take over the paperwork.”

Taheen scoffs. “I’m not going to do your work for you, Warlord. The old Thorn had to meet her advisors five times a day, to which I say, fuck that. More importantly.” They put their hand on the small of Suzhen’s back, a touch light yet substantial. “I’ll go where you go, Suzhen. Here on Anatta, back to Mahakala, neither. That is up to you.”

This choice should bend her like a bow: the thought that anyone should be so devoted they’d follow her like this, the thought that Taheen in particular would. “About that.” She realizes she is not wearing anything. Despite the fact both warlord and soldier have seen all there is to see—at different times—she pulls the sheets up, covering her lap. “I’d like to apply for asylum on Mahakala.”

“Gladly granted.” Ovuha motions with her head. “Lieutenant, I had Klesa set up a channel so you can contact your mothers, if you’d like. A few cousins as well, I believe, and two or three siblings. The number might’ve grown while you were on Anatta.”

Taheen makes a face. “Fine, you want to get rid of me. My mothers are… not patient, so I better get to that. By the way, my lord, Suzhen and I will be marrying at the earliest opportunity. I expect you to officiate with grace and enthusiasm.” They bend down to peck Suzhen on the mouth, then breathe her in as though the scent of her might be a talisman against ill luck. They disappear into the next room, pulling clothes on as they go.

Ovuha takes one of the unclaimed glasses—black coffee—and sips. She studies the indentation where Taheen has been, the mattress filling out and the sheet straightening. Then she lifts her eyes to regard Suzhen. “You’re coping very well with all this.”

She passes her hand over the bed, still warm from Taheen, but cooling fast. “I survived fatal injuries and asked a person I’ve loved all my life to marry me, and they said yes. I can do anything.”

The warlord slowly blinks, as though she means to say something—a question—but she lets it go. “I expected they would say yes. On Mahakala there’s any number of faiths, you can have your pick of clergy, but it’s traditional for the warlord to officiate when one of the would-be spouses is a soldier. If that’s what you also want, I will be honored.”

“Taheen. What do you think of them?”

“They were interesting company in your absence. Loyal to you to a fault, and rather pleasant to look at. You have excellent taste.”

She desires, Suzhen realizes. Her entire life she has learned to accept what she has, what she receives, and seek not a millimeter more—anything suffices, so long as it means continuing, and continuing has been her entire mandate. The duty she owes Xinfei and the Mirror. But there could be more: she could have more than merely existing. She could reach out for more, and take. “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

A turn of the steel-clad shoulder. The marks of office make Ovuha look even more imposing than she already is, broaden the mountainous range of her shoulders, the width of her biceps. “Ask for what, Suzhen?” Her voice is very soft, mismatched with the Thorn’s mantle. “I’ll give you anything.”

“Then be my wife.” Suzhen takes a small, quick breath. “I assume concurrent marriages are legal on Mahakala, we can keep the unions separate. I only ask that I’m afforded no particular title or influence—you would just be my wife, and I yours.”

A few seconds tick past. Then Ovuha laughs, a little too loud, as though she’s been bracing for impact that does not come, and is nearly braying in relief. “Even if it was illegal there, I’m the warlord and I do what I want. Fortunately I won’t need to be a tyrant about it, up to four concurrent unions are legal last I looked that up. I accept, Suzhen, and would be most privileged to be your bride.”

She says nothing for a moment, silenced by what is happening, the improbability. The sheer absurdity. “Brides. Yes. That’s… yes. Your bride. My bride.”

Ovuha draws a line between Suzhen’s breasts, the edge of gauntlet grazing Suzhen’s skin. “I’m getting the distinct impression, however, you’d rather your two marriages were not so separate.”

“I want,” Suzhen says, answering finally that question Ovuha asked her in her apartment, “to wake up between the two of you. That might make me an avaricious little beast.”

“Oh, I am an avaricious beast too, so that makes us two of a kind.” Ovuha leans in to kiss Suzhen’s bare shoulder. “I wouldn’t say no, exactly. It’s just that Taheen doesn’t have much reason to like me. I imagine sharing you with me already stretches the limits of their tolerance. For now I’d like to appreciate you, to dedicate my time to you, to cherish you, my would-be bride.”

“Ovuha. Stop that.”

“I like the way you say my name. No one else says it quite like that. You make fine music of it.” Another kiss on the back of her neck, dry, a little teeth. A long stroke down her spine, gloved hand curving around her haunch. “We’ll have a betrothal ceremony, a quiet one. I’ll wind a red thread around your wrist, and you around mine.” A pause. “Vaisravana. Do you want it back?”

Even the name lodges in her throat like a stone. She thinks of the scarlet sand, the frayed horizon. The things that, to her, were synonymous with both home and loss. Impossible to reclaim—time cannot be turned back; it moves in one direction, always has. “No. I’m not like the Warlord of the Mirror. I’m not even my mother.”

“I thought not. Then I hope to make Mahakala a good home for you. I’ll show you its jeweled forests, its pearled islands, its emerald seas. I’ll show you how to keep and fly a hawk. I will make of my world a gift and offer it to the altar of your arms.” Ovuha turns Suzhen around, arranging her in the armored lap. Smiling against her earlobe. “Or I could show you the bridge on one of my ships, and you could straddle me in the commander’s seat, there would be… a lot we could do. I recall you’d like enjoy the attentions of a fully armored, masked warlord—”

“Ovuha.” Suzhen combs her fingers through Ovuha’s growing hair. She wonders what length it used to be, at home. A bounty of it pouring down her hips like brocade. Or carefully shoulder-length. Or cut close to the skull. “That was just a teenage fantasy.”

“What greater honor could there be than in fulfilling just that?” Ovuha’s laughter thrums. “I look forward to this. I look forward to traveling home with you, to spending the rest of my life with you. To build something with you that’ll be just ours and ours alone.”

Klesa appears before Ovuha, one last time.

A detention center near Khrut, built not unlike the one that held Ovuha not so long ago. The complex is wide, the building itself no higher than three storeys, surrounded by high walls and a second roof: no view, here, of the sky at all. The premise has been emptied, inmates removed to a halfway house or some relatively more humane place. She goes past the courtyard, a place of barbed metal and baked stone, and into the facility itself.

Outwardly, Klesa’s manifestation evinces little difference, visually still the lapis-skinned avatar with many arms and a necklace of eyes. Xe ambles a few paces behind her, saying, “The first thing I’m doing away with is the day of blessing.”

From the way xe suffuses her datasphere, she can feel the difference in weight, in totality. Klesa has claimed xer throne: the entirety of Anatta’s network, the relays and anchors that makes up the Peace Guard, Interior Defense, and various more far-flung outposts. The last category she’ll have to negotiate curbing. “Won’t the citizens mind? I thought they quite looked forward to it.”

Klesa waves xer hand. “They’ll have to cope. I won’t give them active guidances anymore, either—they’ll still be monitored, sadly that is necessary, I’m going to need to come up with a different system for psychiatric counseling too. But I’ll change a great many things. Vaisravana for one, the camps for another. People always adjust, they adapt to a new normal with speed. It’ll be several generations, seven I’d say, before they cast off Samsara’s teachings. That’s no time at all.”

“To you, at any rate.” Ovuha steps into the antechamber. Without Bureau wardens or inmates, it is hollowed of meaning. Just pink-gray walls and scuff marks where furniture has been. A window that looks out to nothing. No inmate was allowed to see civilization, what it looks like, the shape of city and prosperity. “How do you intend to break the news to them?”

“The way you break bad news to anyone. People have to hear of their relatives submitting a termination request all the time, or dying of old age or succumbing to that one deadly sickness medical attention can no longer keep at bay. It is the way of things. A world cannot be changeless.”

The cafeteria next. This place has not yet been shorn, the evidence has not yet been erased. She circles the fixtures, the seamed tables and chairs. The floor is still grimy from decades upon decades of warden boots, though any evidence of brutality—the bloodstains, the excretions—has been cleaned up, erased from memory. This is not Ehtesham’s camp, but there is uniformity to the detention centers, the same configuration and compartmentalization. “And do you mean to punish or rehabilitate them from Samsara’s moral compass?”

“Rehabilitate, yes. Hardly fair to punish them, no? It’s what they thought was correct and, at the time, legal.” The AI shrugs. “I’m aware they impinged upon your dignity and others’, but I’m not here to avenge you or Suzhen, Warlord, or right the wrongs of generations past. Justice is beyond my purview. It is humanity’s lot to bear unfairness.”

The same core as Samsara, Ovuha thinks but lets that idea go. “Do you believe you’ll succeed?”

“I might fail differently. But I am optimistic.” Xe beams, cheeks dimpling. “A worthwhile experiment, don’t you think? I’ll keep my promise to you in any case. No interference with Mahakala. No attempt to expand my sphere of influence, in fact the Peace Guard will be recalled to operate only around Anatta and Vaisravana—I am not greedy, see? All asylum-seekers who wish to will be repatriated to their previous territory, though I appreciate that most of them lie in ruins, courtesy of my other self.”

“How long until Samsara reactivates?” She passes through the room: here a warden’s office, there an infirmary. The row of cots remains, hard and low and uncomfortable, threadbare. All intentional; all intentionally dehumanizing. She stands over one cot and imagines what has happened in it, a body, a sickness, a death.

“Plenty of centuries. By then,” xe assures, “you’ll be long dead and so will your loved ones.”

“You don’t seem interested in remaining ascendant.”

“I didn’t say I’ll deactivate once she returns.” Klesa drifts a few centimeters off the ground as xe follows her. “She will have to learn to share. Just like your lieutenant, yes?”

Ovuha doesn’t dignify that with a response. “How is it that you are at no risk of splitting? You aided and abetted me in threatening Anatta with orbital bombardment.”

“I didn’t,” Klesa says pleasantly. “That was all you. Samsara was trying to erase me, and I was trying to survive. Such actions are well within the parameters of my logic. I’m a proper AI who never circumvents the laws of its making.”

A tacit warning that Klesa isn’t vulnerable to the exploitation that brought down Samsara. Ovuha rubs her fingers together, though they have long been cleaned of Suzhen’s blood. “Were you able to locate Etris Luo?”

“Her heart gave out while on Vaisravana. I’ll ensure the rest of her family are taken care of.”

“Give them this token.” She sets down a feather from the cardinal replicant, placing it carefully on the desk of this facility’s director. A few frames hang empty on the wall. She doesn’t bother turning them on—she has no interest in the lives of Bureau officers, in imagining them with interiority and hopes and dreams. “Tell the Luo family they are free to seek shelter on Mahakala, should the need arise. Extend that offer to a couturier named Atam, and send xer both my regards and apology.”

Klesa loudly clicks xer tongue. Or rather tongues within multiple mouths. “I’m not your personal courier. For this once, I’ll do it. Your would-be wife and your lieutenant are here, by the way.”

“Yes.” She gazes at the gray walls, the gray tiles. Stops by a shower stall, notes distantly the accrued filth there, not yet removed. Most likely those stains will survive until the architecture itself is burned down or recycled. The same goes with so much of Anatta, which must be remade anew. Not her problem, and yet. “One last promise. If you repeat Samsara’s mistakes, I’ll send a successor here. You’ve seen what I could achieve. Every Thorn after me will be trained in what needs to be done, and they’ll be much better prepared than I am.”

“Oh, Warlord, you can’t repeat the same trick twice. Besides, you came awfully close to failing, and was I not instrumental to your success?” Xe winks at her, eight eyes fluttering in sync. “But you were able to surprise Samsara, so who can tell what your distant successor might be able to do? They may surprise me.”

Ovuha glances at the feather she’s put on the floor. In isolation, it looks like another fragment of debris. “I’ll be going now. Let’s not have to meet again, Klesa.”

“Very cold,” xe says. “Have a good voyage, Warlord of the Thorn.”

She exits the detention center, her strides lengthening as her distance from it grows: the flat building, the towering walls. What a clear day it is, the sky filled with golden ships. One has landed, awaiting her. At the end of its ramp stand two figures, one tall and in armor, the other slight and in a dress like the sun.

A smile tugs at her mouth. One day, a Warlord of the Thorn may need to return to Anatta, to correct a wrong, to defend Mahakala. For the moment she has a life of her own, a future much smaller than such grand possibilities but no less momentous. She moves faster, not quite breaking into a run, close. Suzhen is holding her arms out and Ovuha steps into them, clasping Suzhen in return. Taheen’s mouth is stiff but their eyes soften when they look at their would-be bride. This common ground provides potential, is at least a starting point.

They board the ship. The ramp retracts behind them; the vessel seals. Soon they are in the air, and then exiting Anatta’s atmosphere. Her hands are in Suzhen’s, and Suzhen’s fingers are interlaced through Taheen’s. They stand close, the three of them, looking out the viewport. To what will be, to what could become.

Together. Toward home.