Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Originally published by Robinson

TODAY, IN AN EIKSTOWN COURTROOM, THE COMMISSARIAT SHOWED HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE COMMONWEALTH MEET THREATS TO THEIR FREEDOM: WITH THE COLD MACHINERY OF JUSTICE! IN THE GALLERY, MEMBERS OF THE ACCUSED WATCHED WITH THE HOODED AND REPTILIAN EYES OF A DRACO AS THEIR SENTENCE WAS METED OUT. THE TRIBUNAL DELIBERATED, AND SWIFTLY THEIR VERDICT CAME DOWN: IT WAS TO BE DEATH. LET THE JACKALS OF THE MANDATE BE WARNED: THE COMMISSARIAT STANDS READY, THE SWORD OF THE PARTY! BUT THE SWORD MUST HAVE ITS SHEILD—THE WATCHFUL CITIZEN! REPORT ANY SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO YOUR LOCAL COMMISSARIAT FOR STATE SECURITY OFFICE. BE AWARE! BE VIGILANT!

1

City of Whitebottom, one mile south of Green Banner Electrical Station No. 45. A cold evening in winter.

I ducked beneath the fire-cracked lintel of a gutted patrician mansion, reached into the mended-and-remended pocket of my woollen overcoat and once again pulled out her letter. The thick paper card was sooted by the same coal dust that coated my aching hands. The words on it I had already committed to memory.

Kaffa Brewcourt. 22:00 tonight. res mutatae mutatae non sunt. The note wasn’t signed, but that last phrase was written in blotted black ink, and it was all the signature I needed.

Attia.

Years ago, amid the bright-eyed passion and the party slogans and the thinly veiled tension of the University annex in Ravenna, we had together composed those words, a political slogan as true of revolution as it was of love and war. But in the twenty years since the bloodshed at Aelia Capitolina, since I’d last seen her, I’d barely thought of it. I’d been too busy running, keeping low and quiet in backwater cities, stewing on old betrayals. Hiding from the Commissariat. Until today. Until this yellowed slip of paper had appeared in my pigeonhole at the electrical station. Attia. Twenty years since that night in a rundown kaffahouse, stinking of sweat and sulphur, waiting for a woman who had never arrived. Twenty years since she’d broken my heart. Why now, after so much time?

I stuffed the letter back into my coat and stepped onto the rain-slicked streets of the city I still thought of as Vindobona. The air tasted wet, bitter, as thick as the heavy fog. She was out there. Somewhere in that grey atmosphere. I moved from beneath the shadow of the abandoned mansion. On the stonework above me dragons and dragonriders were trapped in time on a blackened frieze.

"Cacō,” a shrill voice exclaimed. "Dulcis cacō!" agreed another. Kids, running ahead through the white haze like wraiths, cackling to each other in high voices. Latin was still outlawed, so naturally the child-gangs that overran the New Commonwealth had adopted it as their native tongue. I waited until their voices receded further into the fog. Then I folded my shoulders and splashed hurriedly down the street. I slipped past an idling diesel truck, turned a sharp corner plastered on both sides with Party recruitment posters, and stopped at the glass door of a soot-stained kaffahouse.

Kaffa Brewcourt. I stepped up to the glass and peered inside, heart thudding. The kaffahouse was lit with low hanging lights; the high ceilings and peeling plaster walls fell away into shadow. Marble tables stood in a ragged line and a piano with keys like yellowed teeth squatted in one corner. A pale, ox-boned proprietor slouched behind the dimly lit bar, polishing chipped porcelain cups with a discoloured rag. No sign of Attia. I glanced at my timepiece. Still early.

The door squealed as I pushed it open. Hot air and the smell of roasting beans and stale cigarettes. I stepped cautiously up to the bar. The proprietor did not look up as I sat, just thudded over to a brass machine that groaned and spat steaming kaffa into a small white cup. I spared a glance around the room. Empty but for a large man in the back corner, sweeping again and again the same bit of floor. The proprietor turned back to me, rattled a cup and saucer onto the bar.

“Thanks,” I muttered. 22:01. No Attia. I fought off a shiver. I thought of the last time I was supposed to have met her in a kaffahouse. She hadn’t arrived then either.

I took a shaking sip of kaffa and reached for a ring-stained newspaper that had been left on the counter. Bold black headlines proclaimed heightened tensions along the New Commonwealth’s continent-spanning border with the People’s Mandate, the state of arms purchases from the long broken away colonies across the ocean in Nova Roma, and the newest ever increasing production quotas. It didn’t take much subtlety to read the subtext: yet another war with the Mandate was looming.

Someone stepped into my field of vision. “More kaffa?”

A shadow fell over me: a thickset man with deepset eyes. The one from the back corner. I hadn’t heard him move. I flicked my gaze down to my cup of thick kaffa, which was still more than half full; along the bar, where the proprietor was now nowhere to be seen.

It all slotted into place with brilliant and icy clarity: the typed letter, the too-empty public house, the proprietor’s strange attitude, the truck idling outside…That letter wasn’t from Attia. She wasn’t coming.

After all these years hiding, the Commissariat had found me.

“No,” I managed. I snaked a hand across the table towards the small porcelain cup—the closest thing I could see to a weapon.

“I insist,” he said.

My hand found the saucer. I didn’t plan my next move. I lurched back in my stool and flung the cup of steaming kaffa at his face. The thickset man swore and stumbled back, steaming black liquid running down his cheeks. The cup bounced off his head and then exploded on the tiled floor. Still holding the saucer I smashed it against the counter and grabbed hold of the largest piece: a jagged half-crescent which I swung at him like a blade.

His meaty palm caught my wrist with a wet slap.

And then from behind, unseen hands snatching me roughly by the shoulders.

“Easy,” said a high quiet voice. “We just want to tal—”

Gloved hands were holding my shoulders. I twisted my wrist half-free and then cranked my neck. I bit down.

“Shit!” said a not-so-quiet voice behind me.

“Put him out,” the thickset man growled.

Barely a moment to cry out before being shoved to the ground. In the gap between that first push and the moment when my face hit the ground, my mind raced through the twenty-some years that I’d spent on the run—the failed relationships, the arms-length friendships (my landlord Viktor, with whom I shared a single nod once every day, as close a friend as anybody) and the days and days spent with my head down at the electrical station, trying hard to not to be noticed, shovelling coal into a high pressure boiler that roared hot and burned nearly as bright as dragonfire.

A wet boot pinning my cheek to the sticky, sweet-smelling floor; a black burlap hood that reeked of stale sweat. And then a needle lancing my arm, pain more bludgeon than prick, and lightness spreading through my body, blooming behind my nose and eyes and mouth.

“Time to go, Artur.”

Self-satisfied Imperial historians called the two millennia of uneasy peace that existed between Roma and Cháng’ān the Pax Draci. We accept now that these two words are a lie, do nothing to convey the suffering that the two imperial powers wrought upon their own people. And yet in the bloody lie there is some gleaming black bone of truth.

2

Attia. So much of my life had revolved about her. Since those days when we’d first met, young students at the University with not much in common but a hatred for the Commonwealth, and the Party; for every apparatus that had risen up to replace the Emperor, the Patricians, and their dragons. Not uncommon sentiments in Universities during those days, which was how we’d found ourselves at a protest that became a riot that now stood like a firewall between the two halves of my life.

Even now, all these years later, I found myself trapped in her gravity. Even now I dreamed of her. Of course I did. We were at a party I was hosting with my roommate Sina, and she was perched atop a wing-backed chair. In this dream she seemed luminescent against the shadowed walls of my squalid walkup. She was scrawling left-handed notes in a ubiquitous copy of Wagner’s Green Book, the book that held the living word of the Party. But the notes she crammed into the margins of revolution were not words but tightly packed equations—numbers I recognized dancing with strange ideograms I didn’t.

Was this even sleep? Or did I lurch through some soporific induced hallucination? It was a dream and it was a memory. Or it was the liminal area between. The weeping walls of the garret seemed to fall away vertiginously, though the other students who crammed the party and chattered in some lost Vandalic dialect that I couldn’t quite decode didn’t seem to notice. This was still the early days of the revolution, some part of me realized, long before the chaos in Aelia Capitolina, those first years after the Emperor had been shot in the crypts beneath the Palatium Magnum and the last dragons had been sieved with hot bullets by squads of Revolutionary Guard. This was the first night I’d met her. Or some version of it.

And then I was looking her in the eyes, mismatched eyes, one a murky sort of green, the other dark and completely dilated (she was nearly blind on that side, I would learn later). She appeared in my dream as I remembered first seeing her: small and fairly bony, her body disappearing into the over-large tunic suit that hung about her shoulders. I realized with a start that I looked as I do now, and laughed.

Hot wind on my back. I turned. The wall behind me had fallen away completely, and thrusting a feathered, prehistoric head from the fog that grew beyond was a dragon. It opened its mouth, revealing triple-rows of jagged teeth. A smell like kerosene and spider-webs and old book glue. Its plumage glimmered red and gold and green. All the party guests continued their discussions, ignoring the massive, autocar sized head that heaved into the cramped garret. They had all, I noticed suddenly, been burnt black, charred meatsticks oozing blood and pus from their seared flesh. Their eyelids had been scorched away, so they looked at each other with expressions of constant surprise.

“The dragons are dead, Gaius,” Attia said. “We killed them all.”

The dragon pushed its head through the living room until it was so close I could feel heat radiating from emerald and sapphire down that covered its snout and glinted in the bronzed light. This was a Nile Dragon, and it looked nothing like the creatures of string and wire that jerked across the screen in those Committee sanctioned historicals that featured Otto Marx as the heroic Octavian, making his doomed stand against the black powers of Antonius and his mount Apophis. This felt real, as real as the dragons who had been shot to death in the air above the Bautai plateau, in pens beneath patrician mansions. Who died roaring at the chattering of machine guns, the buzzing of warplanes, the winking lights of tracer fire.

The jaw of the beast yawned wide and hot fire spewed forth, so bright that everything became white light and heat

Then Attia was gone and I spoke words I couldn’t fathom into a black room. I couldn’t even hear what I was saying. My mouth was dry and my words sounded like drunken mumblings in my own ears. I stopped speaking abruptly, aware suddenly of how much my entire body hurt. My arm throbbed. I turned my head, and realized that it wasn’t the room that was black, but rather the hood draped over my head.

It all flooded back. I cried out.

I sat in a hard wood chair, hands bound tight behind my back. I could hear an electrical hum and the occasional soft thud of heeled boots. Light spots danced in the hooded darkness. But beyond the dull pain lancing through my head, all I felt was numb surprise.

I thought back to Attia’s letter that for all I knew was still in my coat pocket. How could I have been so stupid, to think it was her? She had left me more than twenty years ago.

"Gaius Plebius," said a nasal voice.

Gaius was dead, killed during the riots in Aelia Capitolina. I was Artur now. The hood came off in a rush and I blinked into a bank of high-powered lights.

"My name is Artur.” My words sounded slurred. I might as well hold onto that, though I had no idea how much I’d said already, mumbling away in a drug-induced lunacy.

Faint movement on the far side of the room. A mechanical lever clanked down and two of the lights popped off, leaving behind only the ghostly orange of cooling filament wire.

Two figures resolved from the lessened glare, both staring at me from across a low table made of polished wood.

I blinked and looked around. I had expected to find myself in a concrete interrogation room with discoloured walls and a rusted iron door. Instead I seemed to be in some kind of living room—an apartment or hotel I couldn’t quite be sure. Light walls and grey carpets; beachwood accented furniture and coarse grey upholstery; thick white curtains filtering bronze streetlight.

What was I doing here? I turned to the two figures on the sofa across from me. A man who was seated and above him a tall woman with her arms clasped behind her back. The pair of them wore grey. A floodlight stood on a tripod behind them, its cable snaking to an outlet on the wall beneath a white radiator.

“Awake now, I see.” The man was looking intently in my eyes. For signs of awareness, I realized belatedly.

“Where am I?”

“You are in the Grand Whitebottom Hotel,” he said. “I’m sorry that the room is not so grand as it once was. Such are the times, Gaius.”

“That’s not my name.” This had to be some trick. Some kind of interrogation technique. The Commissariat’s Internal Security Directorate was shrouded in mystery and rumour, but everyone agreed they were subtle. And deadly. I wasn’t going to admit to anything. I was, after all, still tied to a chair.

The man sighed, looked up at the woman standing beside him. She showed no reaction. The man was pale and had dressed in the drab uniform of a Commissariat major (brass buttons, red piping, bright green New Commonwealth flag on the collar) and the woman—Han, apparently, which made her a strange sight standing beside this particular man—wore a party tunic-suit with a pointed collar that was cinched tightly to her throat. They were a contrast in shapes: him short and formed something like a tortoise, with a tiny shrivelled head and a body that ballooned out at the waist, her tall with broad shoulders and a broad face, long black hair tied into a tight tail. She had large calloused hands, and kept her eyes turned down towards them, never looking at me directly.

The man slid two fotos out of a hemp folder and placed them on the table before me. "Gaius Plebius,” the Major said for a third time. “A carded member of the Ravenna Student Continuance Council. Wanted for counter-revolutionary activities. A known instigator during the Aelia Capitolina riots."

I had a brief image of Attia, there, on a street filled with blood and screaming, smoking rifling clenched in too-tiny hands.

I found myself leaning forward. The foto was black and white, grainy, but still intelligible: a young man sitting alone in a kaffahouse. I felt my heart lurch. The figure in the image looked twenty years younger and much thinner than the reflection I saw every morning in the cracked mirror of my one-room flat. I recognized the kaffahouse too, the same one in Aelia Capitolina where I’d laid low for three days, hiding, waiting for Attia.

I’d lost her there amid the blood and smoke and screaming. I’d run through those mad streets to a backwater kaffahouse where we’d agreed to meet in case we became separated. I’d waited in that kaffahouse three days, looking up each time the door opened, hoping vainly to see her walk back into my life, hoping vainly that she hadn’t been arrested or killed. But of course she never had. In the end I’d fled, taken a new name, and gone into hiding. In my heart I’d thought of her as dead.

Shock still thrummed through my body, reverberated down every nerve. They had known I was there, in Aelia Capitolina, in that kaffahouse, waiting for her. Why hadn’t they arrested me? “Where did you get that?" I whispered.

He started pulling more fotos from his folder. With each new print I saw that same man, the same reflection, but ageing as the prints and the years went by—the last twenty years of my life spread out there on the table

I almost couldn’t breathe. I’d been hiding from the Commissariat for twenty years, certain that they would arrest me if they ever found me. That I would be sent to the northern labour camps and worked to death like so many friends I’d had. But they’d known. They’d always known. They’d followed me from afar for years. Why?

"Song, would you untie Gaius please?"

The woman—her name was Song, apparently—frowned at the major and then with a blurred movement whipped out a sling blade from some hidden sheath. She paced around and sliced the ropes that bound my hands. When she leaned close I caught the scent of stale tobacco. Why were they untying me?

"I’ll be honest," the Major said, "we aren’t much interested in what you did or did not do twenty years ago. This all would have been much easier if you hadn’t tried to kill poor Charlez with a saucer." The Major’s smile revealed a glittering nest of amalgam fillings that wove through his teeth. "We can assure you that if we were from the Political Directorate you wouldn’t have even have had the chance to defend yourself."

I struggled to follow what he was saying. The Commissariat Political Directorate protected the state from sedition and counter-revolutionary activities—the crimes I was guilty of. So if these two weren’t members of the Political Directorate…"Who are you?"

"We’re with the Primary Directorate.”

The second true shock since I’d woken. Primary Directorate. Foreign Intelligence. Spies. What would spies want with me?

"We brought you here," the Major said, as if in answer to my question, "because we need your help."

The room, my life, my understanding of the word, all of it wobbled. What was happening here? A widening gulf between expectation and result. “Why—I mean…For what?”

Song stared at her strong hands. Flexed them. She still hadn’t looked up at me. The Major kept on smiling.

"When was the last time you saw Attia Vitellia?"

I felt my gut twist. The telegram. They had sent it.

"We know you were both at the riots,” the Major said. “We know that you were lovers."

Lovers. Once. Old betrayals die hard. “The last time I saw her,” I said, “She was on the front page of The Truth.”

That had been the final knife. Years after the riots, years after thinking her dead, I’d woken one morning to see her smiling face with its mismatched eyes splashed across the front page of the party newspaper. There she was, the woman I’d loved, who I’d thought hated the party as much as she loved me, shaking hands with some minor functionary. A desperate scan of the article revealed that she had become a magistra at one of the state universities and was being awarded a medal for some breakthrough she’d managed in physics. The fact that she was still alive was enough of a shock. But there she was: working for the Central Committee. She hadn’t died or been captured. She’d betrayed me, our friends, everything we believed in, for the sake of her fucking work. If any vestige of Gaius had remained, that had killed him.

The Major leaned back and smiled a little bit. "When did you last speak to her?”

“The riot,” I knew that was an admission. At this point I didn’t care. I’d followed her from a distance, as she published her papers and became one of the most famous physicists of her age. But I couldn’t bring myself to do more than that. I couldn’t bring myself to confront her.

Too afraid…

“What does any of this have to do with her?” My anger thrummed through me, vibrating along every nerve.

The Major flitted his gaze up to Song and she responded by finally meeting my eyes. "There’s no reason for you to know this,” she said, “but five years ago theoretical metallurgist Attia Vitellia defected to the Mandate government."

A thought and a pang, one that I recognized as both familiar and irrational. And yet there it was: how could she have left without me? We’d often spoken of leaving the New Commonwealth altogether, to forge a new life in Nova Roma, or even maybe the Mandate. I gritted my teeth. But that was twenty years ago. She left because she doesn’t give a shit about you.

The major adjusted the round spectacles on his nose. “At least that’s what everyone but Song, myself, and now you believes.” The Major straightened in the sofa. “Vitellia has, for each of those last five years, been working with us. Spying for us. She’s been deep cover on the inside of a top-secret Mandate military project in the Taqlar Makan desert."

Slowly I came back out of the past, out of the bitterness that waited there. I came back into the cold white hotel room. For the first time I noticed that the Major seemed worried. “What?” I said.

The Major sighed. “She’s a double agent. Attia is our best scientist, and the Mandate were all too willing to believe that she wanted to defect. She’s been feeding us military secrets for years.”

Song pursed her lips unhappily. "About a month ago Vitellia came to me.” I turned my gaze to her. She spoke perfect Gothic, which shouldn’t have surprised me but did.

"Song,” the Major interjected, “is Attia’s courier and control officer. Her local contact inside the Mandate.”

Song continued: “Attia said that she was ready to come in from the cold. Back home to the Commonwealth. She said that she was going to bring…” The tall Han woman paused there for a moment, as if searching for a word. “Bring a high value asset with her."

The Major nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. “The extraction was supposed to have happened two weeks ago."

I was still trying to process everything they were saying. Why were they telling me all this? Why would they reveal state secrets to some one-time counter revolutionary who had been hiding like a coward for the last twenty years? Was it part of some elaborate ruse? It didn’t make sense…

Unless they need me. Instantly I knew it to be true. Why else would they bring me here, why else tell me this? I needed to be careful. I needed to play this just right. I licked my cracked lips and leaned forward. "What happened to her?"

Song shook her head. "She didn’t show. She disappeared from her apartment, her labs. Vanished without a trace. Our initial assumption was that she’d been burned. Caught by counter-intelligence agents."

“She makes a habit of missing appointments,” I said without thinking.

Song looked at me a moment, cocking her head as if considering.

"But then," the Major continued, "last week we received a coded message from her at a secondary dead drop. Vitellia wants to meet again."

Curiosity warred with anger. “So what? What does this have to do with me? What do you want?”

"The message indicated that she would only meet with one man. One Gaius Plebius, known currently by the alias Artur Liefson."

Song pointed to my pocket. “She gave us that letter.”

Something shifted inside me. A small gap opened and all my fear drained away. All that remained was anger. She left me sitting alone in that fucking kaffahouse for three days. For twenty years. Until now, when she wants something. Another betrayal, in a long line of them “What?” I nearly growled. “What does she want?”

“We don’t know.” The Major folded his face until it manifested as something miserably unhappy. “We need you to find out.” He entwined his fingers and leaned forward. “You and Song will travel to Korla in the Eastern Mandate, and there make contact with Vitellia. We need you to talk to her. Find out what happened.”

“You are going to help me extract Attia and the asset.”

I wanted so badly to laugh. It was just too ridiculous. Travel with spies into the heart of the Mandate? “And why,” I said instead, “should I help you?”

The Major flashed his row of capped teeth. “Curiosity?”

All mirth was gone now. I glared at him.

His own false smile fell. He pulled a gun from his pocket and placed it on the polished wood table. “You’re going into the Eastern Mandate, or you’re being pulled out of here by your feet. Your choice.”

I stared down at that cold barrel. I wasn’t afraid, I realised. A Commissariat bullet was how I’d always thought I’d die, though I’d always pictured it happening with me blindfolded and lined up again a brick wall rather than sat in a well-appointed hotel room.

I couldn’t help but feel that I had nothing to lose. I ignored the gun and locked gazes with him. “You wouldn’t have brought me here unless you thought you needed me,” I told him. “Sounds like if you kill me then you’ll never be able to get her out.”

The Major narrowed his eyes. “Maybe so. But getting her out is merely our preferred option.”

Song stepped forward. “We need your help,” she said. “We can give you your life back.”

“I don’t want my life back,” I said, thinking of the mouldering apartment that was my home, the rusted gas element and sink full of pots that was my kitchen, the ceiling with flecked spots of black mould, the bookshelf with a handful of dusty volumes, the bowed mattress with stained sheets. The walls without picture frames, paintings or art.

“Your old life then,” she said.

Smoke and blood and screaming students in Aelia Capitolina. I wasn’t sure I wanted that back either. I flicked my gaze from Song’s pleading eyes to the Major’s expressionless ones, to the cold barrel of the gun. "You said that she was bringing out a high value asset. What is it?"

I could see him hesitating, weighing.

“Tell him,” Song said.

Finally, he shrugged. "Dragon’s eggs," he said.

This time I really did laugh. The major blinked in surprise, which just me laugh harder. The last dragons had died out nearly forty years ago, along with the Empire and their patrician masters. And now the New Commonwealth, a state founded to destroy them, worked to bring them back. And somehow Attia was in the middle of all of it.

Res mutatae mutatae non sunt…The words—her words, our words—came back to me then. All humour drained away. Was this why she’d written them. Had she been trying to tell me something?

I looked to Song, and the Major, still waiting, breath baited, for my decision.

I realized then that I’d already made it.

The first mechanical flight—conducted in what is now the Commonwealth, on the Dis Pater Collis by the brothers Antropov—was actually witnessed by members of no less than five Patrician families, a cartel of dragonriders who had funded the endeavour on a whim. Upon seeing the brothers’ rickety wooden contraption skim a bare two-hundred feet down the side of the hill, the riders are said to have only laughed. The thought that one of these flying machines might ever pose a threat to the great draci of their houses was beyond anything they could imagine. They couldn’t see a future for that ridiculous contrivance of wood, string, and wire. In the Mandate, however, officials would take the Brothers, and their invention, a little more seriously.

3

I sat with Song in the back of a military plane, a noisome Ruz-54 that glinted silver in the sunlight and juddered from the power of its twin props. We were to go south and east to Eikstown, and then on to Marakanda on the Mandate border. We would cross the border by train, as air travel between the two nations had been once again severed.

It was the first time I had ever flown, and I realized quickly that I hated it. The rumbling engines roared so loud I could barely think, and the brief moments of free-fall that accompanied every patch of turbulence were terrifying. At my feet was a disintegrating leather bag stuffed with spare clothes. In my hands I clutched a copy of the Party Green Book. I’d grabbed both from my apartment before we’d left, inspired by the words that had been written on that letter.

I flipped the book open. On the inside cover: res mutatae mutatae non sunt, scrawled in her handwriting. I flipped it open to a random page where the margins were filled with more of her cramped writing.

It was the same book she’d been writing in the night I’d met her, at a party for disaffected students Sina and I had hosted in our walkup. Even in those days she’d had been something of a prodigy, assisting the university’s most senior magisters with experiments at the cutting edge of chymistry and physics. She hadn’t been political when we’d met, it was only after the struggle sessions and university closures of the Cultural Adjustment had threatened her work that she’d fallen in with radicals like Sina and I. It had taken some time to get started, but our affair had burned hot and bright.

She’d given me the book the night we’d snuck into the great hall of the university library after it had been locked and shuttered to make love beneath the suspended ebony bones of a dead dragon. We’d been lying, sweaty and tangled in a scratchy woollen blanked that we’d thrown hastily over the marble floor, when she had pressed the book against my chest. I remember feeling the weight of it, the heat of her beside me as she lay curled against my body, watching the dragon above us sway slightly on its hanging wires. “When I’m a famous magistra and find my new element,” she said, “I’m going to name it after you.”

It was the night I’d known that she loved me. Now the memory of that set my teeth on edge.

“What a good little Party member you are,” Song said, raising her voice to carry over the droning engines. She was sat across from me in the long, bare metal fuselage of the transport plane.

I blinked and looked down at the book still in my hands. I shoved it into the leather bag. “A different kind of memento.”

She stood and stepped surely across the deck towards me, a thick folio clutched in her strong hands. She had changed outfits, eschewing her grey Party tunic-suit for a dark pleated jacket and thigh-length skirt, fashions, I gathered, that were popular now with women in the Mandate. She had unbound her hair and it fell loose about her shoulders. She sat down. “I don’t like having to yell.”

We hadn’t spoken much since leaving the interrogation room. She and several broad, featureless men with meaty hands had escorted me from my apartment to the aerodrome, but the men had stayed behind when we boarded the plane, which was now empty except for the unseen flight crew.

Song nodded at the book I had stuffed away. “A present from your lover?”

There had been a time when I’d looked at that book and thought only of how much she had once loved me. “A reminder that not everything stays the same.”

I could feel Song’s gaze boring into me. “She might not be how you remember her,” the agent said. “It’s been a long time.” She brushed invisible lint from her skirt. “You really haven’t seen her since the riots?”

I shot a glare over at the agent. “No,” I said. “And what does it matter anyway?”

Song was shaking her head. “I got to know Attia over the last few years. We worked together a lot. She—I think of her as a friend.” She dropped her gaze. “I don’t understand why she didn’t show up to the meeting. It’s not like her.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I muttered, thinking again of the empty kaffahouse.

“I don’t understand why she wouldn’t meet me. I don’t understand why she sent for you.”

“That makes two of us.”

Song sighed. “It’s possible that she has been burned,” she said. “It’s possible that Mandate intelligence is pulling the strings here.”

I shrugged. “So I stay here and get killed by the Commissariat or go there and get killed by the Mandate. Does it matter? I’m dead either way.” I smiled a bit. “It’s only you that has to worry.”

She looked at me. “And what about Attia? What about your former lover? Are you worried about her?”

“No,” I said, but even as I did I knew it was a lie. If she’s dead then I’ll never know why she left me, I told myself, but knew that wasn’t quite the truth either. I cared for the same reason I’d brought that copy of the little book. “She’s always managed to take care of herself,” I said.

“She saved your life,” Song said. “That has to be worth something.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say to that? It was true, even if I tried not to think of it. I saw here there again, in the smoke and the haze of Aelia Capitolina, rifle clutched firmly in hand. Saving my life, only hours before she would leave me forever. Why, Attia?

Song reached down and pulled a hemp envelope out of the folio that rested now at her feet. She passed it over. “Take a look,” she said.

I unwound the red string that sealed it and looked inside.

It contained: a handful of creased Mandate bank notes pressed into a soft leather billfold, a cheap nickel-plated watch, a passport with a foto and another name, and several typescript pages detailing my new identity.

Yet another new identity. What fork had my life taken to lead me to this?

“You’ll need to memorize that if we have any hope of getting through the border,” Song said.

I nodded. The border between People’s Mandate and the New Commonwealth stretched across the centre of the continent, through deserts and steppes and heaving mountain ranges. Countless wars had been fought over that massive frontier, but the unforgiving terrain and sprawling distances reduced battlefields to charnelhouses where hundreds of thousands of men were minced for the gain of a few spare miles. Every decade or so since the revolution another war would spark, and millions would be bundled onto trains for the front line, to be cut down my machine gun fire, or pressed into the earth by an artillery shell. Economies would teeter, food would become sparse, and then an armistice would be signed, giving each state enough time to recover before the cycle would repeat.

It had been nearly a decade since the last war had ended, but by all signs another would start soon. Maybe within weeks.

"You’ll probably pass."

I looked up from the folio open on my lap. Song was eyeing me.

"For what?"

"You look like a mongrel,” she said seriously. “You can pass for a local in any number of cities. How much Türkik do you remember?"

Mongrel. I’d been called worse, but never with such clinical detachment. My father had come to Aelia Capitolina from the northern Persia—at that time a protectorate of Empire—though he and my mother had given me her family’s name. They’d thought it would help me fit in, though it certainly hadn’t helped. I’d first learned Türkik from the grandmother who’d raised me, and when I wasn’t writing slogans and hosting counter-revolutionary meetings at University I had actually been studying linguistics. And of course the Commissariat knew that. "A little.”

Song nodded. "Try to stick to what you know. It will be slightly less obvious than gothic." She twisted her mouth a little. "Or latin."

We refuelled at the old capital in Eikstown (once Byzantium) where the Plaza of Heroes could be seen easily from the air, a long concrete slab that had been built over the ruins of the Hippodrome and now seemed to blend with the lead sky and grey seas.

"We’re operational now," Song said as we lifted off once again. "From now until we’re back, you are Unal." It was the name on the passport that I now held in my hand. He was a man who had been born in Kyiv, lived in Persia—now independent, though a client state of the Mandate—and sold petroleum drill bits. "The Mandate have spies everywhere, so don’t feel safe because we’re still in the Commonwealth. The hardest part will be getting through the border without raising any eyes."

"What do I call you," I asked. "What’s your alias?"

She cocked her head quizzically and then laughed. "Song," she said.

We flew east again, closer and closer to the Mandate border. Out the window, the mountains crawled by. I pictured a dragon soaring somewhere below, it’s feathered wings stretched out in full flight, the small figure of a man strapped to its arched back with ropes and leather harnesses. Ptolomey had flown this way, I remembered suddenly, while mapping the East for his Geographica. I thought of Attia, who must have also travelled this way before defecting. What had she been thinking?

"Why is this Egg so important?"

Song’s eyes were closed and her thin long fingers were clasped lightly in her lap. "Because the dragons are all dead. You know that." She didn’t open her eyes.

"A dragon isn’t gone win any battles. Not anymore."

She opened her eyes. "The shooting with the Mandate has stopped for now, but the war still continues underground. A living dragon would be a rallying-point. An important victory in the psychological struggle."

"I thought the Central Committee said that dragons were a tool of oppression?"

"Anything can be politically rehabilitated, Unal. Even you."

I ignored that. “And so what about Attia,” I pressed. “What does a metallurgist have to do with dragon’s eggs?”

Song shrugged. “I’m no magistra.”

I stared out the small porthole in the transport, at the desolation crawling by beneath. “Attia hated dragons. Her grandmother had served in a Patrician household, had watched her sons and husbands fed alive to the family draco because they’d offended their master. She was as opposed to their existence as anyone I’ve known in my life.” I shook my head. “As much as anything has changed, I can’t imagine her working to bring them back. I can’t understand why she would help you do that. It doesn’t make any sense.”

When I looked back to Song she seemed pensive. Then with a bare shrug she closed her eyes again and leaned back. “You’d be surprised, Unal. Not everyone who works for the Central Committee is as sinister as you’d believe. Some people end up in places they’d never expect, for reasons they never dreamed of. Anyways, like I said. There’s no more true power in dragons. They’re symbols. Nothing more.”

Who was this woman, this Han, a native of the People’s Mandate who now worked for her nations enemy? Lies and mysteries, layers and layers that I couldn’t even begin to penetrate.

The causes of the First Mandate War (as we call it here in the west) were varied and complex. Treaties, alliances, wars between client states: all these things contributed. But the most widely believed cause is this: some strange ailment was afflicting the Himalayan Draci within the Mandate of Heaven, and for decades they had been dying. The Mandate was, the Patricians of the Empire thought, defenceless. A fruit ripe for plucking. And yet why did strike when they did? The truth was, they were afraid. Afraid of the growing strength and wealth of the Mandate, the political reforms that had ended the monarchy there and transferred power to the proletariat (though in truth it was the burgeoning merchant class who held the true power, then as now). And so it was fear that led the children of the Great Patrician Families to gather their ancient draci and strike in a writhing, flame-wreathed fist at the Mandate capital.

4

The Mandate border crossing was crammed into a narrow point between weathered granite cliffs, and everywhere I could see barbed wire and concrete. Bundled soldiers squinted down from metal watchtowers, their faces wrapped tight against the cold.

We had landed in Marakanda and then taken a train up into the mountains, travelling through the night in a freezing sleeper car with windows that rattled like loose change. Song had made me go over border procedure again and again, memorising each typescript that had been inside the hemp folder. After hours wending up into Tiān Shān Mountains we had finally pulled to a stop at a depot several hundred feet from the border. The Mandate used a different gauge of rail, and so we would transfer to another train once through the border.

If we got through the border.

It was nearly evening when we poured off the train, and grey clouds had drawn in around us like a heavy wool blanket, threatening snow. The wind was cold and ferocious, pushing through the pass like air through the lips of a dying man. It even smelled cold up here. Commonwealth guards peered closely into our faces and escorted us from the train to a concrete building where they would process our exit papers.

I shivered, from nerves or cold I wasn’t sure.

We were ushered through the document check and then out of the cold concrete building where found ourselves outside once more, on a flat band of freshly ploughed cement that stretched for three hundred feet between the New Commonwealth and the Mandate, an empty kill-zone over-watched by searchlights, guard-towers, and machine gun nests. On the far side sat another barbed wire fence and a brick building to counterpart the one we’d just exited. Above the brick building the red-and-blue flag of the People’s Mandate snapped in the wind. We walked out and into the killzone.

It was the longest three hundred foot walk of my life. With every step I expected to hear alarms or sirens, the chatter of machine guns, or the bright flare of a searchlight. But the only sound was the wind and the clapping of our boots against cement ground. The low brick building across from us gradually grew larger.

"Are you ready?" Song asked.

"No."

"Remember, they’re going to separate us to be processed, so stick to the prepared notes in case they cross-reference our stories." She smiled at me then, and I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot all about Attia and defection. "Don’t worry," she said. "Everything will go fine."

I could only nod.

The inside of the Mandate Custom House was heated and lined in eggshell-painted plaster. Soldiers separated us into lines that wove through cordoned pathways towards a row of polished wood kiosks.

Even through the freezing cold I could feel sweat in my arm pits and on my palms

A Mandate Border Officer waved me forward. He did not look up when I approached. Instead, he held out his hand expectantly. I froze. What was I supposed to do?

The man raised his and frowned at me. "Papers?" he said in a slightly pitched and strange sounding gothic dialect.

I hastily handed over the passport clutched in my sweaty hand. Gods! I could almost feel the fear seeping from my pores.

"I see those Commissariat officers really scared you," the guard said with a smile.

I opened my mouth to respond, and then snapped it close with a click.

I could defect.

I could tell him that I was being forced against my will to engage in espionage and that the woman now in line with the pleated dark coat was a New Commonwealth spy. I could start another new life for myself, somewhere near the coast. Sháng hăi or Guăngzhōu, maybe. I’d heard they were nice cities.

I shot a glance over at Song, who was talking to another guard not twenty paces away. A word and I could be free. A word and she was most likely dead.

The guard seemed amused as he flipped through the pages of my passport. "Don’t worry, I won’t make you say anything you’re not supposed to. What is your destination in the People’s Mandate?"

"Korla," I croaked.

The guard nodded. "Purpose?"

Espionage. "Petroleum drill bits." If I was going to say something I should say it now. This was the moment where I got to choose. Until now I’d been pulled along by a rope, tugged by the whims of Song and the Commissariat and Attia. If I wanted to take my own route, this was my chance.

But what would happen to Attia? By necessity defecting meant revealing who and where she was. One way or another, it meant her death.

"Born in Kyiv, were you? I visited there once after the war. Those bridges over the Danapris!" the guard shook his head as though they were the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. "What is the name of that tower bridge again? With the big red cables?" The guard looked up at me, mouth smiling but eyes dead behind big round glasses.

A test. The names of the bridges hadn’t been in the typescript.

The guard’s smile was frozen. His eyes bored into me. Gods! I should tell him everything now!

And then I felt Attia’s fingers walking up my back and I wasn’t Artur, or Unal, but Gaius again, lying in bed with her, sweaty and happy after having made love. "When I was young we lived in Kyiv," she whispered in my memory, "my Grandmother used to take me down to the river and tell me stories of Kyi and his sister Lybid, who founded a city to keep their people safe from dragons.”

I had turned over and smiled. "Was that true love, then?"

She shook her head. “True love is something else. Brighter even that dragonfire.”

"The Lybid," I whispered now to the guard. Damn you, Attia. I thought.

"What?"

"The Lybid. They call that bridge the Lybid." I said again, louder. Even now I couldn’t betray her.

I wondered if she’d known that.

The Battle of the Bautai plateau is considered to have been the death knell of the Roman Empire. It had been so many centuries since the Imperial Air Command had used the dragons in battle that they made no attempt to adapt their strategy to fit the changing reality of war. The Mandate, on the other hand, had been desperately devising a way to meet the dragons that they knew were coming. Their draci had been dying slowly for decades, and unlike the Patricians, they had few qualms about developing new technologies. And so four hundred Mandate warplanes intercepted the Imperial flight on its way to strike Cháng’ān, and with carbines roaring brought down an entire generation of riders in a fusillade of tracer fire. Two hundred and thirty dead draci. In all the years since Actium, the Empire had never been defeated in battle. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Revolution followed so soon after.

5

The Korla safehouse was squared into the second floor of a three-storey tenement that sat on the outskirts of town. Out the window I could see a brightly lit fillingstation with a name written on it in characters that I couldn’t read. It must have been the tenth such station I’d seen already. As far as I could tell, everybody in the Mandate had their own damn autocar.

Everything in the safehouse felt like it had been produced in a factory somewhere. The paintings were all prints that felt vaguely familiar, and the plastic-and-stainless-steel kitchen furniture looked utterly alien. The walls were papered in deep mustard yellow (printed with geometric designs that didn’t line up along the rolled sheet’s prominent seams) and plastic, lotus flower curtains covered the windows. Everything smelled like the chemical mothballs that were stuffed into the cabinets and between sofa cushions. A transistor radio sat on a sideboard in the living room, along with a pack of cigarettes. They tasted weaker than Great Northern Canal, and had little foam filters built into the butts. I sat at the plastic table in the kitchen and smoked them, trying to wrap my head around the strange world I now found myself in. After turning over the entire flat to make sure it hadn’t been bugged, Song had gone out into the city, to speak with her local contacts and leave a message at the hidden dead-drop for Attia.

The Mandate felt like an entirely different world. I’d noticed the difference as soon as we boarded the new train on the other side of the border. The seats were woven fabric and leather, and the private compartment even had a tiny little desk lamp bolted into the tinier side table. The glass on the window did not rattle.

"I think I was flagged at the border,” Song had said as soon as we were settled into our sleeper car.

“So what happens now?” I had asked.

“We stay alert.”

We had descended from the mountains at night and passed into the desert. I had quickly fallen asleep.

That first night my dreams were fractured and nonlinear. Perhaps a residual effect of the drugs they had given me. I would be at work, shovelling coal, and then falling through foggy skies, sinuous dragons winging around me as I fell, breathing fire in bright flashes that lit up the white fog like signal flares. They would emerge briefly from the thick atmosphere and snap at my ankles with rows of jagged teeth. I would kick at them and then try to fly away but my legs transformed into fused blocks of granite. Legs that dragged me down to the surface, into murky dark, that weighed me down, down, down.

I had woken sweaty and restless to find we had stopped. Outside it was still night, the sky stretching endlessly over cold empty desert. Canopied trucks were parked alongside the train, and shadowed figures moved between them. Army men in olive coats and polished jackboots were on the train, checking passports and shining heavy electric torches in the faces of passengers. I felt my throat closing.

Song must have seen my face. “Don’t panic,” she had said. “This is routine.”

So I showed my passport to a bowed reed of a boy with thin dark whiskers sprouting from his lip and chin who barely glanced at it before moving on down the carriage. Then were moving again.

Night, day, and night again. More checkpoints. I slept and dreamed of Attia and of dragons.

I woke one morning to find we had arrived in Korla. One more check of documents and then out into the winter desert city.

It was an ancient city, a desert town in the Eastern Mandate that had at various times been part of other kingdoms and a key stop along the spice trading routes. It had been swallowed by the Han Empire centuries ago, and had stayed part of that state when the Mandate had moved from Heaven and to the People. The massive damming and hydrology projects of the previous decades had allowed Korla to boom into some kind of desert metropolis, with people fleeing the overcrowded cities of the East to settle on cheap land opened by networks of culverts and aquifers. Beyond the city limits sprouted new residential areas that had row-upon-row of symmetrical wooden dwellings with south-facing doors and hipped roofs tiled in baked clay.

The military loomed everywhere. Soldiers stood at every cross-street and it seemed that every other vehicle was a diesel-belching truck laden with strange equipment being ferried out into the freezing desert. If anything the troops here felt more edgy than those in Marakanda: so tense as to be almost fragile.

The research station where Attia had worked was out in the desert and restricted to military personnel. I didn’t want to think of how many more troops might be out there.

I lit another smoke. I was struggling to comprehend this place. Such an arid landscape, transformed now into something that teemed with life. Everything felt so deeply exotic to me.

I heard footsteps outside the door. Song, probably, returning from her reconnaissance. The door squealed open, and slammed shut with a thud. Song entered the laminated kitchen. "I think we’re clear," she said.

“Any word from Attia?” I asked.

The spy shook her head. “No. There was no message from her at the dead drop. I’m not surprised. I think she must be laying low. The whole city is on edge. They know the military is looking for somebody. But they don’t know who. Or why. I’m going to leave a message for her tomorrow.” Song shrugged. “We have to hope that she responds.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s it? We wait for her to get in touch? That’s the Commissariat’s master plan?”

“Attia is hiding somewhere in this city, with half the Mandate army looking for her.” Song walked over to a kitchen cabinet and took a tin off the shelf. “Roadblocks, dogs, door-to-door searches, the whole thing.” She wrested the tin open and measured a few heaping spoons of dried chá into a glass pot. “They want her back, no doubt, but more especially they want the dragon’s egg she took with her.”

I frowned. “If they want her back so badly why haven’t plastered her face on every lamppost from here to the border?”

She set a kettle onto the stove and lit the gas burner. Blue fire flickered beneath the chromed steel. “When she defected it was on the front page of every newspaper here. The most prominent Commonwealth scientist, defecting—one more proof of the superiority of the Mandate way of life. If they admit that she’s a fugitive then they have to admit that they let a double agent into the most secret of their military research projects.”

I thought of Attia hiding in some tenement or basement here in this dusty, cold, desert city. Now it was her turn to sulk in the shadows, afraid that at any moment a heavy-booted kick would splinter a door and end her life. I wondered if she had any friends here, anyone she could trust.

Did she have a lover? Still, now, after so much time that thought made my heart ache.

“Do you want a drink?” The kettle barely had time to whistle before she whisked it off the element.

“Not any of that. You have kaffa?”

Song indicated a cupboard. “There’s some up there. I never drink it so you’ll have to brew it yourself.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know how. I always make my guests brew their own.”

“You get many guests here?” I asked as I walked over and opened the cabinet beside her. She indicated a tin painted with peonies and I slid it off the shelf.

“Song has many friends.” She brushed her shoulder against mine as she poured steaming water into the large glass chá pot. “She works selling petroleum. She hosts dinner parties once a month. Her friends think it queer that she never married.”

I put the kaffa tin on the counter, didn’t open it. “Why do you work for them?”

“What?”

“The Commissariat. Why do you work for them?”

Song smiled, regarded the chá leaves that unfurled inside the clear glass pot. “How could I betray my country, you mean?”

“No. That doesn’t offend me. I would betray the Commissariat in an instant.”

She laughed. “I suppose you would.” She stirred the tea and then placed a lid on the glass pot. “So what does offend you?”

“Why would anyone work for them unless they had to?” I said, thinking of Attia.

“Would you think less of me if I told you it was for the money?”

“I don’t believe it. Maybe if you were some minor functionary passing secrets in the mail for the occasional wad of cash. No. You’re in too deep, you know too much. You’re too good at what you do. You actually believe in them.”

Song was quiet for a long time. For a moment I wasn’t sure if she was at a loss for words or simply didn’t know where to start. “I did, once,” she said. “I’m well past a belief in anything now.”

She turned to me and our eyes met in a rush I was aware of how close she was, the heat of her body…in one moment there had been nothing between us, and in the next I felt some spark of tension or energy. I realized suddenly how long it had been. Her hand rested on the counter by the brewing chá. I placed mine on top of it. Without making a conscious decision, without considering, I leaned in.

My lips met a single finger she had raised between us. My eyes, which I didn’t remember closing, shot open. She took a half step back, opening a space between us that felt like a gulf, that snapped whatever energy I might have imagined between us. That finger could have been a wall, a thousand feet high. I felt my face going red. You’ve known her for less than a day. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

Song just shrugged, picked up the pot and poured chá into an earthenware mug. "Tomorrow we will hear from Vitellia,” she said casually, as if nothing had just happened. “Hopefully we will get a better idea of what she wants. Why she wanted you brought out here."

I nodded lamely, shuffled back. “What—” I cleared my too loudly. I was only half-considering her words, still mostly thinking of how much of a fool I was. “—how do we get her out?”

"We’ve made plans. Here," Song reached into the same tin she’d pulled the dried chá leaves from. This time she removed a snub-nosed revolver. She placed it on the counter between us. "In case things get out of hand."

And like that, the moment between Song and I was forgotten. I reached forward cautiously and picked up the gun. It felt cool and heavy, nickel plated with a handle inlaid in polished black dragonbone. I hadn’t touched one in decades, had never been trained to use one properly. I swung the chamber open and saw eight brass slugs inside.

Song’s face became contemplative. "I have no idea what Vitellia was thinking when she insisted that we drag you out here to meet her. Why would she want you, a man she hasn’t seen in twenty years?" She sipped from the steaming mug. "I keep coming back to that. Why you?"

A question that I asked often enough myself. “She saved my life once,” I said, thinking again of Aelia Capitolina. Smoke and fire and blood. So much blood. “Maybe she thinks I owe her.”

Song reached out and touched my cheek, the rough brush of her calloused hand reminding me of that attempted kiss. My face went hot again. “Get some sleep tonight. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Then she turned and left me standing in the kitchen, revolver still cradled in my beat-up hands.

IN RAVENNA, AND EIKSTOWN. AELIA CAPITOLINA AND ROMA ITSELF, LOYAL YOUTH FED UP WITH THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY EXCESSES OF THE INTELLECTUAL-CLASS ARE RISING TO THE COMMITTEE’S CALL! THE UNIVERSITIES, THOSE FESTERING WENS OF PATRICIAN THOUGHT, ARE BEING OCCUPIED BY THE YOUNG GAURDS! THE INTELLECTUALS ARE DENOUNCED! IN TOWN SQUARES, IN VIEW OF ALL THEY SEEK TO OPRESS, THESE PATRICIANS CONFESS THEIR CRIMES! BUT THE PARTY IS BENEVOLENT! IT’S SEEKS NOT TO PUNISH, BUT TO RE-EDUCATE! TO THE FIELDS AND THE MINES THEY SEND THOSE WHO HAVE NOT LABOURED A DAY IN THEIR LIVES, TO LEARN INNER PEACE THORUGH HONEST HARD WORK. THE YOUNG GUARDS LOOK ON IN APPROVAL, KNOWING THAT TODAY, THE COMMONWEALTH IS STRONGER.

6

The next morning saw Song drive her autocar through the bustling centre of Korla to the Tiānlóng War Museum. Low mountains dusted with snow rose to the north of the city, and as we drove along the straight paved roads we passed ancient sandstone stupas and temples that sat beside low brick office buildings with brightly coloured awnings. The sidewalks were crammed with people: men in pressed suits with large open cuffs, women in long high-cut dresses with satin or silk shawls, an underclass dressed in grey coveralls covered in grease or coal, and hawkers with carts piled high with the fragrant dried pears that grew in orchards that surrounded the city. On the streets were hulking autocars with big round headlights and engines that growled like starving animals. When we finally pulled into the large gravel parking lot by the museum I leapt from the stuffy cab and into the cold desert air. Chrome-sided buses were parked in a neat row, and groups of tourists thronged everywhere, some chattering in Mandarin, others in Türkik dialects I couldn’t quite understand, most wielding hefty foldout maps and taking grinning family fotograms. They all seem so rich.

“We’ve been using war museum as a deaddrop for the last year,” Song had told me as we drove up. “There’s a potted plant in a Tiānlóng exhibit—when either of us need to communicate we mark the pottery with chalk and sink a deaddrop spike into the earth.”

I felt a knot in my chest. Just knowing that Attia came here regularly was almost too much to handle. What if she was here now? Twenty years separated us. Would I recognize the woman she’d become?

The museum had once been some kind of temple or palace: its façade was several stories tall and built of smooth stone the colour of desert sand. Pointed niches and intricate scrollwork ran along the second story, above large brass-bounded doors that stood open in an arched portal. Around the entrance leafless polar trees clustered along wending paths dotted with benches, their empty-fingered hands clutching at a grey winter sky. Song gestured, and then followed the surging mass of tourists as they flowed into the building. “The deaddrop is in the third exhibit hall,” she whispered, as we squeezed with the rest of the tourists through the tall open portal. “Anybody could be watching. Stay back from me.”

I suddenly wondered why she’d even brought me here. I felt the weight of the revolver in my pocket, pressing against my thigh. I shot surreptitious glances at the tourists who milled about, doing my best not to seem scared. I felt keenly an outsider here, no matter what Song said about looking like a mongrel. In Korla there seemed to be more Urghyrs than there were Hans, and many other races as besides: in theory an easy city in which to blend in. In theory.

We stepped into the large domed entrance and found ourselves beneath the outstretched wings of a dragon. Its skeletal frame was suspended from wires and lit by potlights that reflected as small pools of bronze against polished black bones. Hanging opposite the dragon was a decommissioned Mandate Warplane, nose-mounted prop still, under slung machineguns quiet. The creature above us was a Nile Dragon, the breed cultivated and brought to Roma, distinguished by its longer tail and lack of crest horns. Plane and dragon had been positioned by some drama-loving curators so that they were locked in frozen combat.

As we shuffled towards the wooden kiosk to buy museum tickets I was reminded that this wasn’t a culture that hated dragons, at least not the ones that had belonged to their own people. The Mountain Dragons—Heavenly Dragons, as they were still called here—were regarded with something verging on nostalgia.

We purchased tickets and entered into the first exhibit hall. “Wait here,” Song whispered. She disappeared into the crowd.

I stood alone in the middle of a long, dimly lit rectangular room dominated by a ceremonial stone arch, crenelated and covered with glazed brick. The arch was topped by an archery tower with a bowed roof that nearly brushed the ceiling of the exhibit hall. Along the black-painted walls there liteboxes with fotos of the original ruin standing in a mountain pass—‘Iron Gate’ was written in Türkik below the characters I couldn’t read; ‘Re-creation’ scrawled beside the tall arch. Tourists milled about, passed beneath the arch, peeked down from the archery tower above.

My head felt light and my hands jittery. Fear crept into me, seemed to pool in my gut. What if this was a trap? Song had said she thought she might have been flagged at the border.

I ran my gaze over the arch that rose in the middle of the tall-ceilinged room, trying to appear as if I was taking in the architecture. Instead I watched the people milling about it. Which of them might be spies, here to catch us.

Then, in the corner of my eye I saw her.

A woman, dark shawl wrapped about her head, dark glasses covering her eyes. I sucked in an audible gasp. She moved through the crowd, appearing and disappearing like a drowning swimmer being carried out to sea.

Attia. It was her. I knew it. Was so sure.

Just a glimpse in a crowd, a woman turning a corner into another exhibit hall, away from the gate. Away from me. I stood numbly. I wanted to call out to her. My heart thudded against my ribs.

Had it been her? I’d barely even glimpsed her face…

I was moving.

I pushed through the crowd and into the other hall. Dragons hung above me. I ran my gaze desperately through the crowd, searching for that dark shawl and dark sunglasses. Faces of grimacing tourists and laughing children swam through my vision. I shoved past them. Where had she gone? I had just seen her!

I was running. People cried curses as I elbowed past them. Through one exhibit and into another. Hanging planes. Machine guns and gas masks and shells as big as autos. Dragons, horned and not.

But no Attia. I was back in the domed entrance.

Am I hallucinating? The people milling around eyed me strangely. I didn’t care. I opened my mouth to call her name…

…and then Song was there, gripping my shoulder in a powerful hand, her broad forehead creased in anger. “What are you doing?” she hissed. I let her drag me across the tiled floor to the side of the room.

“I saw her,” I gasped. “Attia is here.”

That seemed to startle her for a moment. But then she shook her head and started hauling me towards the entrance of the museum. “It’s too late now,” she said. “I’ve been marked. There was a man watching the deaddrop. He’s following us.”

“What?” I craned my neck to look behind us.

“No,” she barked, and gripped my arm tighter. “Don’t look back.” She pulled me tighter as we passed the bronze doors and into the flat winter light. “I’ll deal with him, you hope he’s alone.” She pushed me away, towards the parking lot. “There’s a bus leaving in exactly one minute. Get on it. It will be safer if we split up. It will stop by the fillingstation. I’ll try to meet you at the safehouse tonight. Don’t trust anybody. If Attia is here I’ll find her.”

For a moment Song was another woman standing before me, saying much the same thing. Split up, it will be safer. I’ll meet you tonight.

But before I could say anything Song turned and hurried in the opposite direction along a path that wove through the leafless poplars. "Wait!" I called after her, questions only now bubbling into my stunned mind, but she did not stop or turn. She ducked, weaved, and then was lost in the crowd.

I turned to the parking lot. A bus was being loaded: a wobbling old man dressed head to toe in khakis was being helped up steep stairs his equally wobbling wife.

My gaze skittered through the crowd that milled in front of the museum, searching desperately for Song or Attia. Only blank and unknown faces looked back. They all seemed to be watching me. I’ve been marked. I felt a shiver. Suddenly every man in the crowd was a Mandate officer. Every pocketed hand was reaching for a gun.

In the parking lot the bus door rattled shut. The engine growled. Air brakes hissed.

And I was running. Out into the lot, away from the museum and the dragons. From Song and Attia, and whatever men hunted them. I ran into the path of the bus as it started to turn out of the lot, beat my open palms against the aluminium grill. The driver swore as he slammed the breaks. I ran to the side door and hammered on the glass-and-metal until it folded in. I managed a mangled apology in Türkik and pulled some creased banknotes from my pocket. I didn’t bother to count them as I shoved them at the driver. He and everybody on the bus stared at me as I made my way to an empty seat at the back.

My breaths came in short gaps. Had I been seen? If Song was marked then there was no way I hadn’t been. I ignored the disapproving looks of my fellow passengers and stared out the window, waiting for olive garbed soldiers to come running towards the bus, brandishing lights and guns. But nobody approached, and after a pregnant moment the driver yelled something at me I didn’t understand and then pulled out of the lot and onto the road. We turned a corner and the museum disappeared behind us.

On my chest I could feel the weight of my terror and in my pocket I could feel the weight of the gun, pulling me, down, down, down.

The First Mandate War ended shortly after the Glorious Revolution, with the New Commonwealth Committee suing for peace after being unable to organize anything resembling a defence. Many of the former Empire’s Northern and Eastern territories were ceded to the Mandate, a sore wound that would fester in the heart of the Old Empire. Some hoped that a new government would mean an end to all war between the two powers. They were wrong. The Second Mandate War began some ten years after the end of the first, with the New Commonwealth government demanding the return of ceded territories. The conflict has raged since, fought mostly in the mountains and steppes of the central continent, with intermittent ceasefires that last sometimes years, sometimes only months.

In the current estimate some 98 million men have died over a border that has shifted imperceptibly in the last forty years.

7

I was a piece in some game being played and I didn’t understand the rules.

I took a drag of a cigarette and watched the darkened outline of the safehouse. I had been out here for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette, waiting for any sign that the safehouse had been compromised. Waiting for Song. Waiting for some sign from Attia.

Had that truly been her?

I lit another cigarette.

Don’t trust anybody.

That wasn’t new to me. I’d known that since those bloody days in Aelia Capitolina, the massive student rally that was supposed to have been the beginning of our own revolution. The Commissariat had known all about the rally, of course. They had infiltrated our local organizing councils with spies and agents.

People like my roommate Sina.

And at the height of the riots, as the students gathered at the foot of the Great Hill and the army brigades had closed in around them, Sina and those like him had pulled out their guns. They didn’t even try to arrest anybody: they had just started shooting. We were unarmed. Many of my friends, the last true friends I could remember having, had died in those desperate moments.

In that bloody chaos Attia and I had become separated. We’d made desperate plans to meet in a rundown kaffahouse and gone our separate ways. It was safer to spit up, we’d thought. But of course she had never shown up.

And now I stood in another city in front of another safehouse, waiting for another woman to come meet me.

Res mutatae mutatae non sunt…

The cigarette butts built up about my feet.

It was well past midnight when I slunk through darkened hallways up to the second floor and entered the safehouse. The inside was black. I stumbled around the dark room, trying to remember where the light switch was, cracking my toe against a wood footstool and banging my shin against a low glass table.

I stumbled into the kitchen. Through moonlight filtering in the window I could see the outline of the peony-painted kaffa tin still sitting on the counter. Quiet. Empty.

I flicked on the kitchen light and picked up the tin. In that moment there was nothing else in world I needed more. I filled a pot with water spat from groaning pipes and cranked the gas burner. I prised the lid off the coffee tin and scooped down inside.

Something beneath the powdered grounds. I reached into the tin with my hand. My fingerers found something. A thick piece of card. I pulled it free.

Words and numbers, written in a blotted black script that I knew so well.

Attia. I knew that writing anywhere. She had been here. But when? A woman in a shawl, moving away through a crowd.

Heart hammering, I stepped backwards and slumped into the kitchen chair. Don’t trust her. Who, Song? The woman who had brought me here, who had probably just been arrested? Had the note been left for me? It must have been. But how would she know…the kaffa tin. Song never uses it.

Come Alone. But where? How to find her? My head swirled.

The numbers…an address? Map Coordinates?

I heaved out of the chair and back into the livingroom, to a tall red-mahogany bookcase with an oversized atlas. I dropped it onto the table and flipped it open to a massive map of the world. There was the zero degree line, running through Sháng hăi. I ran my finger along it. 274.552 λ. I frowned. There were only 180 degrees in each direction. 274.552 didn’t even exist as a position. More from habit, I ran my finger along the equator, and then counted lines to the north, were the pole was marked 90. Neither coordinate was even on the map.

It doesn’t make sense…

Why the riddles? Why all the games? I was furious. I ground my teeth so hard I thought they might explode into talcum.

Focus. Obviously it was a code. One I could decipher and Song couldn’t. Res mutatae…Those words we’d thought were so clever. That she’d inscribed in that copy of the Little Green Book.

Suddenly inspired, I reached into the worn leather bag that still sat by the door where I’d left it. I pulled out the copy of her book. 279.0557 φ. I flipped open to page 279. Her scrawl filled the margins: symbols and numbers raised to the power of crazy. Nothing stood out. Frustrated, I flipped to 274. The same. I thumbed through the book, looking for either of those old Greek letters.

“Cāco,” I swore. What the hell was Attia playing at? Why the hidden messages? Why all the secrecy? Why had she not left a message for Song at the deaddrop and have done with it? Why had she brought me all the way here…

I was staring at the last page of the book, with the airbrushed image of Wagner smiling benevolently. Attia had defaced his image with her pen, making him look like some kind of demon or evil spirit. She had hated the Party, the Central Committee. What had happened to her? Why had she changed so suddenly and so much? That was the real question.

On the blank page opposite the Chairman she had scrawled our slogan.

And a number. No equation this time, just a single long string of digits: 239.0521634, followed by a ‘u’.

I looked back at the thick card I’d pulled from the kaffa tin. Res mUtatae.

Things Change…

Pen, paper, some hastily scrawled equations. If I took each number on the note, subtracted it from the value in the book…I ran my finger along the map. West and then North. My finger ran along the map, drawn to the new coordinates like a lodestone. It stopped in the desert to the south and east of Korla. I felt triumph, and then a cold chill. There. Attia was there.

I’d need a more detailed map to find out where, exactly, but she was there.

People talk of butterflies in their stomach—I felt more like mine was being gnawed at by a nest of rats. I took a calming breath. Think clearly. Things weren’t always what the seemed. How had she known I’d take the book? How had—

Footsteps outside the door. I slammed the atlas closed and shoved the green book into my bag just as the door swung open.

Song stood in the doorway. I found that I was holding my breath. Don’t trust her. She looked me over, ran her gaze through the room, over the atlas on the table, the leather bag on the couch beside me. Her thin lips pursed into a line. After a moment she stepped inside, bolting the door behind her. “Going somewhere?” she asked.

I tried to keep my breathing calm, my voice steady. “I thought you might have been arrested.”

“I managed to slip him.” She took the plush chair beside me. “Were you followed?”

“I-I don’t think so. I waited outside to make sure.”

She nodded. Her eyes searched my face, and I couldn’t meet that gaze. I studied the closed atlas before me. “Did she get in touch with you, Artur?”

Should I tell her? Did I have any reason not to trust her? “No,” I said, though I knew that I’d hesitated longer than I should have.

Song reached over and put her hand on my leg. Firm pressure moving up my thigh. I was hard almost immediately. All those years alone, hiding, nobody to trust or to talk to…My eyes met hers. That arcing energy I’d felt the night before and thought imagined sparked in her eyes.

Don’t trust her…

I sucked in a ragged breath. No. This wasn’t right. I stood up suddenly.

“What’s wrong?”

“I need the bathroom,” I managed. I grabbed my leather case from the seat beside me.

Song stood up, but I was already moving. Into the hallway and towards the bathroom. I did not stop or think. I slid through the doorway and slammed it shut behind me. I yanked the light-chain and rattled the lock across.

My breath came in ragged gasps. What was happening?

I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled the gun out. The gun Song had given me. If she meant to betray me why would she had given me a gun? I snapped open the chamber. Inside: eight brass slugs, arranged in a tight ring.

Song padded to the threshold. She tried the door, which rattled against the lock. "Artur," she said. "What’s going on? Let me in.”

I pulled one of the rounds out of the gun. Turned it over in my hand. My stomach was doing somersaults. The casing was empty. There was no bullet loaded inside.

Don’t trust her…

The door rattled again. "I didn’t mean to scare you."

I didn’t think much about what I did next. I shoved the gun in my pocket, threw open the bathroom window, and climbed outside and into the cold.

THERE GOES THE AIR-SIREN, AND THE COMMONWEALTH’S FURRIEST AIR-MAN IS READY TO MEET THE THREAT! WHEEL-BLOCKS AWAY AND UP INTO THE SKY! BUT WHAT’S THIS? MANDATE SABOTAGE! FROM THE WRECKAGE DIETER PULLS HIS UNCONCSIOUS CREW TO SAFETY! AND NOW, STRANDED IN THE VAST AND EMPTY PLATEAU, THEY MUST SURVIVE. BUT DON’T WORRY BOYS, DIETER KNOWS THE WAY! HOME TO A WARM BED AND A FEW EXTRA BONES, RIGHT DIETER? AIR-MARSHALL YAKUPOV AWARDS DIETER THE DISTINGUISHED AIR-MEDAL! COURAGE, BRAVERY, LOYALTY! AND LOVE FOR THE PARTY!

8

I had spent too much time worrying, thinking about things that were lost and could never be replaced. I needed to act.

I needed: an auto; petrol; food and supplies; a map that would show me exactly where the coordinates I’d scrawled onto that wrinkled slip of paper would take me.

I started with the auto.

The night streets of Korla were cold and dimly lit. Streetlights like paper lanterns glowed softly: rows of firebugs perched on a wire. The only movement on the streets were the lines of military trucks that hissed by now and again in the gloom, and the occasional vagrant who would stumble drunkenly into my path.

I slunk through the night streets, sweating despite the cold, looking back over my shoulder, sure that Song or a Mandate Army Man would be behind me, gun levelled at my face. But each time I looked back there were only empty streets. I found a line of parked autos on a side street and settled on a heavy sedan. It was all rounded curves and chrome finish, and the long front-end stretched out like the barrel of a gun. I could see a pair of keys glittering in the passenger side foot well. I took the butt-end of the revolver and smashed it into the side-window. The shattering of glass made me jump and close my eyes. A dog barked wildly.

Lights flickered on in the gated row houses. I keyed the ignition and pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The engine roared to life. I swung the auto onto the road and drove off.

I looked furtively back in the rearview mirror as I peeled away. No Song. No sign of chase. I wanted to vomit.

Cold desert air pressed through the shattered window. A massive sign perched atop of a warehouse across the river and bled red light into the dark. I couldn’t read the ideograms, but recognized the ubiquitous double-happiness shuāngxĭ. Reciprocal joy, like that shared between lovers.

Attia…had she changed so much? Was she even the woman I remembered from all those years ago? She was a magister of the first order, one of the most respected metallurgists in the world. What did that have to do with dragon’s eggs?

Did I even really care anymore? Or was it about Attia. At one time our love had burned hot. Brighter than dragonfire. And now what? I was hurtling down night streets of a city I didn’t know, drawn into the orbit of a woman whose motives I didn’t understand, who had left me for dead and then drawn me back into her mad world.

I needed the map and supplies now.

Dawn was breaking and I drove through the chaotic morning traffic (blowing through intersections, driving at turns too fast and too slow, and all the time feeling my heart hammer at my ribcage as the wheel slipped though sweaty palms) until I found a fillingstation by a ramp that led onto an expressway. The store seemed to have a random collection of items: packaged foods, a gun-rack, maps and travelling equipment. The man running the station was Han, tall and thin but with jowly cheeks that drooped like empty bags. He had eyes always on the verge of laughter and spoke Türkik well enough for us to communicate.

I opened the billfold that had accompanied my passport and laid several wide bills on the counter. "I need a grid map, four petrol cans, and several jugs of water." I then pulled a last item from my pocket and placed it on the counter. "And I need more of these."

The merchant considered the bills laid out on the counter, and then my face.

I had no idea how much money I’d lain down. I had no idea of the value of the goods I’d requested. I was in no mood to bargain.

After a moment of silence, the merchant muttered something to himself in his native tongue and gave a quick, curt nod.

As he filled out the order, I spread a grid-map open on the hood of the autocar. I unfolded the yellow slip of paper and traced my finger along coordinate lines. It moved across desert, stopping finally off the shore of a large body of water marked in characters that I couldn’t read.

I waved the owner of the fillingstation over. "Where is this," I asked the man, indicating the spot on the map.

The merchant squinted and leaned in to inspect the place that I’d indicated. "Lop Lake," he said. Then he frowned. "Why are you wanting to go there?"

I said nothing.

The man watched my face for too long a moment, and then shrugged. "Not much to see. The lake’s all dried up now. The dams." He gestured broadly as if that explained everything. "It’s all desert. Not much but sand and salt."

"There’s not anything there?"

"Just ruins." He chewed a bit and then spat. "Lots of army out there. Trucks been driving things out into the desert day and night. Rumour says that this is about where they are going." He surveyed the stolen auto. "That part of the desert…Death Sea, they call it."

"Sounds friendly," I muttered, and when the merchant stared at me dumbly I realized that I’d spoken Gothic. Not a very good spy.

"You’re not planning on taking this?" The merchant rapped the hood of the large sedan.

"Why?"

"That autocar is for towns. The roads out in the desert are not for town autos."

"I’ll take my chances."

The merchant shook his head and then pointed to a two-seat truck hidden behind the petroleum pumps. "I’ll trade you for my truck."

The truck’s paint was chipping and it was covered in gray dust. "How much is it worth?" I asked.

"Same as the sedan.”

I shook my head. "I think this sedan is worth four of those trucks."

The man considered my stolen auto. "The window is broken," he said. And then he looked me in the eyes and any sense of mirth was gone.

I swallowed. That truck looked like it would fall apart at any moment. I glanced at my watch. Time was moving fast. "Get the keys," I said.

Dragons imprint. It is how the first riders tamed them. Some part of their avian, prehistoric brains will attach to one rider and bond to him for life. This process seems to have no relation to filial instinct. A wild dragon will imprint not upon its parent as a child, but rather upon its mate as an adolescent. So in some real sense the dragons viewed their masters not as parents or guardians, but rather as lovers. The lengths to which they would go to defend the body of a fallen rider are legendary.

9

I drove all day and into the next night. The landscape stretched endlessly in all directions, hard clay and loose gravel, coloured like a cigarette stain. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being followed. The first part of the journey had been over paved, arrow-straight road. There had been two army checkpoints, but I’d been waved through without incident. As night fell I had turned off onto a smaller road of hardened earth and had bounded slowly over a rugged dirt track that faded beneath me with the light. I was actually glad for the truck. The engine made noises I didn’t like or recognize, but the thing seemed to do well on the ripped up road and I made better time than I would have in the autocar. The desert was featureless but for wind-carved yardangs. I felt almost like a dragon rider, setting off into the air above the wide ocean to discover the New World. Into uncharted territory.

What was Song doing now? Searching for me, most likely. I charged on. The need to sleep pressed down on me like a massive weight.

I had nearly nodded off at the wheel when the flare of headlights moving towards me snapped me back. I geared down and pulled to the side of the road. The lights were so bright that I had to squint, and they jerked like bad dancers as a vehicle bounced over the hardpan. As it neared the vehicle swung into the middle of the track and stopped.

I chewed my lip. Army? Magistrates? Some lost farmer?

I skidded the truck to a stop and plumes of dust spiralled up and away from the big wheels. I was very suddenly and very definitely awake. With the glare of headlights in my eyes I couldn’t see anything. My hand found the revolver on the seat in beside me. I rolled down my window.

“Need help, friend?” I called in Türkik. The engine of the auto before me shuddered and stopped. The lights remained on. I heard a door swing open. Heeled boots crunched against the desert. A figure crossed over the lights, a silhouette that marched towards me. Tall enough to be Song. What if she’d found me?

The silhouette called out something in Mandarin, his voice hard and sharp as a razor. That settled it. Army. I picked my passport off the seat and held it out the driverside window.

“I’m here on business.” I called out in Türkik.

“This is a restricted area.” This man spoke it naturally. He sounded hard. Not some half-trained boy like those who ran most checkpoints. “Turn off your headlights.”

I did. And then pulled back the hammer of the revolver. I could see from his silhouette that he didn’t have a weapon drawn. But who knew how many more men might be in that truck. I licked my lips. Pulling out the gun might be a death sentence. But then maybe I was already dead.

He started walking towards the truck. A mistake. It would make this easier. I held the revolver against my belly, low enough that he wouldn’t see it until it was too late. He reached down to his belt. I tensed, waiting for him to take out his firearm. But instead he unlooped an electric torch from his belt and clicked it on.

“What are you doing out here this late?”

“I’m on my way to the base,” I said, squinting against the lights that beamed into my face. “They’re importing machine parts for the tests.” The dragonbone handle was slick with sweat. I just needed him to get a bit closer…

“The base is three hundred miles to the south. What’s your clearance? What—”

The desert scuffed beneath his boots as he stopped before the drivers’ window. His eyes locked on the gun that was pointed up at his head.

“How many more in your truck?” I whispered.

“Three.” He said it without hesitation. This close I could finally see his broad pock-marked face, his shaved head with long angry scars webbing their way across the scalp. Patches of shadow hid his eyes, but I knew they were narrowed about my face. “Drop the gun and everything will be okay.”

“Step back,” I said, calmly as I could manage.

He didn’t move for a moment, and then took a half pace away from the truck. I dropped my documents and then opened the truck door, gun aimed at his face. I swung out into the desert. I waited for a sound or cry from the still-idling truck. Nothing. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no plan here. “Drop the torch.”

He glared at me, and then let the long chrome tube slip from his hands. The glass cracked against a rock and the light flared out. “Turn around,” I said.

“No.”

The word hung in the air. I was shaking. Could I pull the trigger? Could I kill this man in cold blood? “There’s nobody else in that truck,” I said. “We both know it.”

“Put down the gun,” he said. “I’ll let you get in the truck and drive away.”

Sweat ran down my brow and froze against my skin. “Just turn around,” I whispered. I could hear the desperation in my own voice.

He stared at me a moment, and then turned his back to me. I sucked it a breath. Without taking the gun from his back I knelt down and picked up the torch in my spare hand.

“I don’t know what your plan is,” he said, “but you can—”

I swung the butt end of the torch with all my strength. It cracked against the base of his skull, splitting the skin open. He staggered forward, blood flowing over the collar of his uniform. He cried out in pain. I hit him again. He staggered to his knees. A third hit and he was face down in the desert, not moving. Blood pooled beside him.

I was panting. In the light of his truck’s headlights I could see dark red glinting on the end of the torch. Had I killed him? Cautiously I paced over to his prone body. As I neared I could see his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

Relief flooded into me. I took calming breaths. Now what to do? I looked up as his truck, then mine. I looked up at the horizon, where the faintest glow of dawn was beginning to spark in the distance. I needed to make a decision.

The petrol cans and water I moved over to his truck, which was actually a canvass-topped reconnaissance car. I stuffed them into the flatbed which already held several boxes of spare uniforms. I tore the sleeve off one and tied it about the unconscious man’s wound, and then dragged him over to the back of my own truck. I punctured the fuel tank and let all the petrol run out into the desert sand. Even if he did wake up he would be miles and miles anything or anyone, unable to alert the Mandate army before it was too late. By time he walked back to the road and flagged down a passing truck I would have Attia and be out. Or so I told myself.

I jumped into his military car, turned a tight bouncing circle, and then drove off into the desert, glancing back only once at the silhouette of the rusted truck I left behind. I hurtled forward towards Attia and whatever else waited for me.

It was dawn when I arrived. The sun had just lifted over the horizon when I saw a massive dark form come into view at the end of the track. There, its enormous skeleton half-buried, black rib bones arcing into the sky like scythes, was a dragon.

I rammed the transmission into a lower gear and rolled down towards the body. The road seemed to end here. Beside the dragon loomed a rock tower that at first I’d thought was a massive yardang, but on closer inspection seemed to be ruins of a building. Nothing moved as I neared. I rolled the vehicle to a stop and carefully climbed out.

I closed my hand tightly about the curved handle of the gun. "Attia?" I called. My voice seemed to boom over the desert and salt flats.

No response. I crunched over the gravel towards the crumbling stone tower.

“Attia!”

Silence. Just a ruined tower and a long-dead dragon. I was alone. Just like in that kaffahouse, all those years ago. She wasn’t here.

She wasn’t coming.

I felt something inside of me break. Some fragile lockbox where for years I’d held all my hope. I yelled at the dead things in front of me. Screamed. I could feel tears welling in the corner of my eyes. I spun back to the auto. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Where I was going to go. She had left me again.

But then, as I spun back around, blinked through tears that still welled in my eyes, I saw a plume of dust rising up on the horizon.

My heart wedged itself in my throat. Somebody was coming. Was it Attia returning? Or had somebody found that army officer already.

Blood thundered in my veins. My head felt light and dizzy. What was I going to do? Hide. The tower, looming above. I ran to the base of the rock hill that it stood on and scrambled up the loose slope. I ducked through the low doorway and into the dark tower.

The inside was pitch black and colder even than the desert. I pressed myself against the wall by the door. I could not see far into the ruin, and had no interest in exploring. Anyone or anything could be in that darkness, watching me.

I heard the tires of an autocar rattle over the gravel. A door opened and then slammed. Boots crunched on the loose rock.

"Artur," Song called. "I know you are here."

My mouth was completely devoid of moisture. How had she found me? I remembered her eyes in that hotel where I’d first met her, in the safehouse as she’d studied me. I pulled the gun from my pocket.

What could I do? Hide until she made her way up here? Shoot her when she stepped into the building? What if Attia was wrong? Or was playing me for a fool? What if Song was who she said she was and was only trying to help me? I had been so sure Attia would be here to explain it all! What a fool you were. I felt the gun in my hand. The weight of it. Something inside of me resolved.

I stepped out of the tower and into bright sunlight.

Song stood between the two trucks. She had eschewed the business outfit that she’d worn through the border and now sported desert khakis.

She spun towards me as I emerged from the tower, the gun in her hand trained on my head. I raised my hands into the air and paced down the rock slope towards her.

“She’s not here,” I said. “If you were hoping I would lead you to her, then I’m sorry. Looks like neither of our plans worked out.”

She lowered the gun. “Why did you run off like that? You scared me.”

"Don’t pretend, Song, or whatever your real name is. You’ve been in control the whole time, moving me like a piece on a bloody game board." I dropped my arms to my sides. "You, Attia, everybody has been acting on me. Acting through me." No more. I’d been pulled around by my nose for too long. I wanted answers. I raised the gun, aimed it at her.

Song looked neither surprised nor afraid. "What are you doing, Artur?"

"There never was anybody else at the Museum, was there? You’ve been lying to me the whole time.”

"Artur, listen to me. If I meant to betray you, why would I have given you that gun?"

"Because you loaded it with empty shell casings." I cocked the hammer back. "I sorted that out though.” The shopkeep had helped me with that.

Her face became a stone mask. “Has she been in contact? What did she tell you? Tell me what she said to you.”

“You wanted me to be alone after the museum. Why?”

"I thought if I left you alone Attia would make contact. I didn’t realize she had until I came back to the safehouse. How did she get a message to you?”

“The kaffa tin.”

Song closed her eyes and shook her head. “Of course.” She looked at me then. “Whatever she told you, you can’t trust her. She has used you for you entire life. How do you not know that by now?”

"And so what? I should trust you?" I said the words, but at the same time couldn’t shake her words. Why was I putting my life on the line for a woman that had betrayed me and everybody I loved? Who had pulled me half-way across the world for reasons that I couldn’t understand. Why?

Song said, "I can’t tell you that you should trust me but—”

And then, mid-sentence, she threw herself to one side, raised her gun.

I squeezed the trigger.

Two gun-blasts exploded through the desert. I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them again I was on my back, looking up at the big blue sky. Pain radiated from my shoulder.

Oh…

And then desert became the streets of Aelia Capitolina and I was on my back again, surrounded by screaming students and hammering feet, the diesel belching of trucks and the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns. Feet crunching towards me through the cold and wind of the desert; in the muggy heat of the city Sina pacing, gun in hand. Two skies, both blue and yawning.

Sina-now-Song leaned down over me. Their faces were once face, separated by twenty years. Agents of the Commissariat, cold, calculating.

They aimed their gun at my face. I was, had been, certain I was going to die. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had cheated death the first time, all those years ago, and now it had come to find me again. Full circle. What choices, what path had led me out here to this patch of desert to die?

I had come here because I loved her still, I realized now.

Another gunshot. A final one.

My eyes fluttered open. Blue sky. No Song, no Sina. I turned my throbbing head and saw her.

Attia. She looked the same, just older. A few more lines. But those eyes, those beautiful mismatched eyes. She stood like a figure from memory, in the entrance of that stone tower, a Mandate rifle smoking in her hand. A stood just like she had stood in Aelia Capitolina all those years ago with a gun in hand and a look of shock on her face. This time there was no shock.

“Attia,” I croaked. She looked at me. All at once those years were swallowed up.

She scrambled down the loose rock that led from the tower and came to kneel beside me.

“Cacō, Gaius,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” There were tears in her eyes.

What is happening.

She felt at my arm, pulled my shirt open. I turned my head and saw Song’s body beside me in the desert. Her face, slack now in death, looked no longer like an immovable stone.

“You saved me,” I whispered.

“No,” she replied. She sniffed through the tears. “Not yet.”

She untied a kerchief knotted about her neck and pressed it into my shoulder wound. I growled in agony. “Res mutatae mutatae non sunt,” she intoned. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” She laughed bitterly through the tears. “Probably not quite what we meant.”

What does this all mean, I tried to ask. Why weren’t you there? Why did you leave me? Why are you here now…

But the pain was bright light and it was shooting through my vision. I could only manage a grunt. All the exhaustion of the trip pressed down on me. The days on the road without sleep. The terror at being caught, at being found out. The fear of finding this woman who now leaned over me…

The more things change…

I passed out.

It was once said that the true power of the draci lay in the fear that they engendered. They kept a vicious balance. Who dared start a war when the retribution would likely raze all your cities to the ground? Who dared start a revolution when it could be swallowed in searing flame? Nothing burned so bright or so hot as dragonfire. Nothing.

10

I woke inside the tower. Night outside—again or still, I wasn’t quite sure. White bandages were wrapped about my shoulder, and by the lightness that spread now through my body I guessed that I was probably on painkillers. I touched the wound tentatively. It seemed that bullet had only grazed me. Another scar.

Attia. Had that been her, truly?

I pushed myself upright and fought a spell of dizziness. I swallowed the vomit that rose in my throat. I stood and stumbled out into the night.

She sat at the bottom of the slope, by a low fire, tending it with a stick. My heart lurched. She sat hunched and lost in thought, her brow furrowed. She looked up at me when I emerged from the tower. She smiled.

“You’re awake,” she said.

I didn’t move. I didn’t get any closer. “What is going on?” I said.

Attia bit her lip, her smile faltering. “Come,” she said. “Sit down.” I hesitated. The strain between us was palpable. What had I expected after all these years? I made my way slowly down to the firepit. A beaten metal pot rested among the coals, and steam poured from it. I noticed then that Song’s body was gone. As I sat I saw that beside Attia was a metal chest, about the size of a suitcase. The clasps were firmly shut and GA-239 had been etched on the smooth surface. “I suppose we have a lot of catching up to do,” she said.

“I waited three days for you,” I whispered.

She exhaled loudly. “I know.”

“What happened?”

She prodded the fire with the stick. “I was arrested,” she said. “Not long after we split up. I thought I was going to be killed.” She shrugged. “Apparently they thought I was too valuable to waste away in the labour camps. They wanted me to work for them. Weapons research.”

So she had been arrested. “After all they did. All our friend they killed.” I didn’t even feel angry anymore. Just tired and confused. “You could have said no.”

“I was ready to die rather that work for them,” she said. I could hear the anger in her voice. “Until they told me that they’d found you. That they knew where you were. They even showed me fotos of you sitting in the kaffahouse where we’d agreed to meet.”

I remembered suddenly the fotos that the Commissariat Major had shown me in the hotel. Those fotos from all those years ago. A slow realization bloomed inside of me.

“They said that they would leave you alone if I worked for them. They said that if I didn’t do what they wanted, if I tried to talk to you, then they’d kill you.” She looked up at me then, tears in her eyes. “I did terrible things Gaius. I did them to protect you. Because I loved you.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around what she’d said. “All these years, I’d thought…”

“I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

All those years on the run, hiding, alone. I remembered every relationship I’d tried to forge, how they had all been poisoned by the bitterness that I carried within me. I thought of the image I’d made of Attia, the coward, the betrayer. The woman who had cast me away for the sake of her work. The one who had left me alone and ruined my life. I’d made a story in my head, a story of my own life, that of a man wronged and cast aside. But the opposite was true. They self-pitying narrative I’d crafted, the one that had controlled my life, was a lie.

She’d loved me enough to throw away her life, to go against everything she’d believed. And in return I’d hated her.

"Attia," I said. I was beside her. In her blind spot. Her face had shifted, contracting like it did when she worried over an unsolved problem. I reached out and brushed her arm lightly. She was so close. She smelled like the fire and lavender soap.

I stood. "Look at me Attia." She did. I reached down and pulled her to her feet. In those mismatched eyes I my own pain, mirrored back at me. Look what they’ve done to us. I reached for her with both arms, one good and one bad. She staggered forward into my embrace. Her body felt so familiar against mine. I hugged her tight, and didn’t care about the pain that arced through my shoulder. I held her, and hugged her, and then I started crying. As I wept I felt as though she was the one holding me, but then her body began to shake with tears and we were holding each other.

We stayed like that for a long time.

Afterwards we fell back to the ground around the fire and sat with our arms about one another, silently staring at the low flames.

“I worked for them for years,” she said after a time, her words muffled into my chest. “In their labs and universities. I thought of you. I dreamed of running away, finding you, and escaping. But I was watched too closely. I couldn’t risk it. Then, several years ago agents of the Primary Directorate came to me. They said they wanted me to defect to the Mandate, to supply them with information on their weapons programs. I did what they wanted. I came here, worked with the best scientists in the Mandate, feeding the Commissariat secrets all the time. I helped them build a weapon.”

“The Dragon’s Egg,” I said, looking at the chest beside her.

Attia frowned. “That’s what we called it, yes. When it was completed I stole it. I went into hiding. I told Song that they could have it. If they brought me you.”

I shook my head. “You wanted to trade me for the Egg.”

Attia nodded. “But I knew that as soon as they had it they would kill us both. Once you were here I had to get you alone. I planted that message in the kaffa tin, hoping you would find it.”

“In the museum,” I said. “Was that you?”

She nodded. “I got desperate. I needed to see you. I was hoping to pull you away, but Song was too close. I couldn’t get you alone.”

“So what now?”

"We’ll go south. Into the disputed territories in India if we can.”

"Will that work?

She shrugged. "I don’t know. I feel like our chances are better together though."

But they’re still impossibly long, I didn’t say.

Silence stretched between us then, accented only but the occasional pop from the fire.

I rubbed a hand through my hair. Dust shook free. I looked askance at the metal chest. “I still don’t understand. Why so much trouble for a dragon’s egg?”

“It’s not a dragon’s egg.”

“What?”

"Come here," she said.

She took me by the hand and led me into darkness. Holding my hand in hers, she knelt down and pressed it against the metal box.

"Open it.”

I was almost afraid to. What was she trying to show me?

I reached down and released the clasp. I swung the chest open, and frowned. Inside the chest, resting in a wood frame, was a perfectly round sphere of silver-white metal. I reached out and pressed my hand against it. It was just slightly warm to the touch. I didn’t pick it up, but I could feel the denseness of it. "I don’t understand," I said.

"Gailium," she said.

I stared at her blankly. Nothing made any sense.

"I would have called it Arturium if I’d known you liked your new name,” she said sadly. “A new metal, one made in a laboratory. Remember when I said that if I ever found a new element I’d name it after you? I did it. "

"This is the Dragon’s Egg?" I said dumbly.

"All spies have code-names." She laughed then, though the frown never left her face. It made her look sad and afraid at the same time. "The dragons are dead. They wanted to replace them. You can’t remake the past, but you can create something new.” She glanced at her watch, and then the sphere. "Not long now," she said. "You’ll see soon enough. We’ll be safe here."

She closed the lid of the chest and took me by the hand. We scrambled up the rock slope towards the tower, her helping me balance with my bandaged arm. I could feel that widening gulf in my understanding again. This whole ordeal had felt like I was stumbling from one dark room to another. Was she just rambling?

We reached the top of the hill from which the tower emerged, and instead of climbing inside we skirted around the base until we looked over the desert to the East. The moon swung low through the sky and it illuminated a smattering of sandstone ruins below. They were so old and covered in desert that in my minds-eye they manifested as labyrinthine canyons as much as anything man-made.

"I don’t understand."

She pressed her finger to my lips. "Just watch. Wait."

The spectre of death still hung over us. She had dragged me into the most dangerous situation of my life. More dangerous, even, then Aelia Capitolina. Maybe I should be mad at her, but when I studied her face all I felt was a thrill.

"I love you," I said.

The wind whipped through the ruins below. “You don’t understand,” she said. “What I’ve done…”

What was she—

And then, far in the distance, a flare of light. Attia, the salt-flats, the stone city below, were all illuminated as bright as day. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away. Even through eyelids, and then my hand, the white light shone over everything. When it faded I opened my eyes and blinked in the direction of the light. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, brighter than the ten-thousand stars, rose up into the pre-dawn sky. And then there was a low, rumbling boom. A heaven-shattering explosion.

"You see now," Attia said. "You see what they made me do. What I did for you.” She made a sound and I wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying.

The more things ch—No. This wasn’t merely a replacement. We had lived too long in the shadow of our history. I found her hand and squeezed it tight. Make something new.

The horizon shone white with the fire from a second sun. One brighter than dragonfire.