Nattharat catches her in the cafeteria, taking a seat so she can block Suzhen’s exit from the booth. “Is it true you’ve put your potentiate in your home?”
Suzhen counts her options. To pretend deafness. To feign abrupt bowel distress. The possibilities, as they say, are infinite. Not that she was hoping to keep it a secret; Ovuha’s place of residence must, of necessity, be entered into the system. “I’m letting her stay on a temporary basis. This isn’t against regulations, I understand.”
“Oh, no. It is terribly charitable to do. Your first sponsorship can feel so intense, it’s easy to get attached and feel like your potentiate is a victim in need of rescue. But your actual home, my dear? She might steal from you, let in unsavory types, get up to any number of illegal things. So many risks! She’s used to living lean, Suzhen darling, it’s no ordeal to let her return to Penumbra for a few weeks. You can resume orienting her after.”
The sterile, compressed cells. The soundproof walls. The isolation wards. Suzhen has had a lifetime of being condescended to, but she has never felt as viscerally nauseated as when Nattharat calls her darling. “I appreciate your advice, Supervisor.”
“Good. Even the model candidates. And they’re so pitiable, aren’t they, so stricken and deprived, your heart bleeds for them… still, you’ve got to take precautions. Wasn’t her colony in thrall to the Thorn?”
“Formerly. By the time she left it’d fallen to the Comet. Those things change hands regularly.” Suzhen pushes her food around in its bowl. The cafeteria fare is more than adequate—sometimes it is even good—but she discovers that she no longer has any appetite. She thinks of Ovuha’s cooking, its urbane composition on the plate. “I do keep a very careful eye on Ovuha Sui.”
Nattharat laughs, jangling, high-pitched. The screeching of a bird excited by prey. “I’m hardly faulting your work, dear. Just be careful. I’ve had them try to rob me, you know how it is. Enjoy your lunch, don’t let me keep you.”
Her appetite doesn’t return in Nattharat’s absence. It is not even that her supervisor is malicious, monstrous. Merely she is banal, the way most citizens are banal. Refugees are anthropological curiosities, charity projects, or they are thieving vermin.
Suzhen turns to the employment registry. It is, theoretically speaking, extensive: planetwide there is a wealth of possibilities for the potentiate in need of work. In practice the possibilities are closer to poverty. It is not improbable that, given enough time and willingness to try every single city on Anatta, there will be something for Ovuha. But not here, not now when the Thorn is so freshly vanquished and Ovuha’s history—a subject of the Thorn, however many years ago—is upon her like a brand.
A potentiate has eighteen months to attain citizenship, one criterion being employment or academic enrollment. No safety net exists. Workplaces and schools have no legal obligations, no potentiate quota to fulfill.
Whatever her alienation toward Taheen’s circles, she knows her friend’s tastes. She calls them and asks if they would like to have dinner at her home, promising an aesthetic surprise. More than this she does not give away, and it intrigues Taheen enough that they accept the invitation. Then she calls home. “Ovuha. Would you mind cooking for three this evening? Thank you. No, anything will do, I leave it to you; I trust your palate implicitly. My friend will be coming at eight, someone who might be able to get you work. I wouldn’t ask you otherwise, you aren’t a house drone. I’ll be back early.” Nevertheless she still feels, afterward, as though she’s treating Ovuha as a domestic helper, a servant. She goes through what she owns, arranges a particular set of clothes—all of Taheen’s making—and sends them to Ovuha, with instructions on the more exotic parts. The dagger cuffs, the deconstructed collars, the heron-rib jewelry.
She does receive a candidate toward day’s end, a tattered-looking person, their face and arms mottled with scars. “I’ve been here before,” they say in thick but fluent Putonghua, “I’ve been out there. This is my second time.”
So it is. This candidate has been through the probation period before, has been registered as a potentiate. The full eighteen months, but they failed to secure citizenship and so were sent back to the camps. Most remain there indefinitely, transported from one camp to another, to off-world detention facilities and sometimes eventually cast out of Anatta. The candidate states this fact, my second time, as though it will augment their chances; as though it will sway Suzhen in their favor. “Your file says you’re from Gurudah.” Though departed much sooner than Ovuha did: years between them. “This isn’t anything to do with your candidacy, but do you know an Ovuha?”
Their expression flickers, indecisive—will this question help or hinder, will their answer give them another residency, a way out of the camps. “Absolutely,” they say. “We were excellent friends, if it’s the Ovuha I’m thinking of.”
It is a lie, the feed notifies her, not that she can’t tell. To say anything, to grasp at any frayed thread, the slightest hint of hope. Half a plank of wood in a raging ocean. Suzhen entertains the candidate for a time, and in the end lets them know that she’ll prioritize them for the next month. “I would like to see you here again.” A meaningless thing to say. “I’ll make sure you have another chance, as much as I’m able to.”
They look at her, neither dejected nor furious, calm in meeting the result they anticipated all along. “Yes, all of you say that.”
It is not untrue. False hope and lies, those are the things the Bureau trains agents to offer up as though they are gems and currency, as though they are the most precious of gifts. Poison dripping from her fingers, seeping into candidates’ skin. One by one she is complicit in murder.
An hour later, she is off work, bound for a funeral. A mentor of hers who retired from the Bureau eight years ago, a man in his seventies, far from sunset yet. By the grace of Samsara, most citizens can live to see two hundred or two hundred fifty. But he has chosen to die, despite calibrating sessions, despite the comfortable life and what is—by all accounts—a good marriage with his wife and husband. Suzhen talks to the husband at the proceedings, who grieves in the way of someone who’s been grieving for months, a grief that has become chronic. “This is what he wanted, you understand.” The widower dabs at his face. “He wouldn’t let the thought go. The idea.”
The wife stares on, dry-eyed, at the cremation tube suspended from the ceiling. Glass window and smokeless fire slowly incinerating a body that has already been made unrecognizable—all papery flesh and bone shards. Innards and unseemly parts have been removed to burn separately. Two monks in red and saffron preside, giving blessings, scattering a fine spray of consecrated water on mourners.
“I’m sorry,” she offers, uselessly. “He was so kind to me when I got started. I didn’t know he was planning for an early termination.” Seventy, young for those born class prime. Old for someone who were not; old for someone like her mother. On Vaisravana, Xinfei would have lived longer than a century—the Warlord of the Mirror was over ninety, the height of health and virility, by the time she sent Xinfei and Suzhen away.
“He’s talked about it for years.” This from the wife. “There wasn’t anything wrong with him, his psychological profile was perfect; he barely needed the calibrations. But he felt old inside. That his time was done. That more days were pointless because nothing changes, nothing is new. As if we weren’t enough, the two of us, the three of us. I don’t think I will ever forgive him.”