Ovuha opens the cage. The cardinal twitters. It is untampered with; she tucks it into her pocket.
“About time you turned up.”
She catches the reflection in the birdcage’s bars, an image of an image. Physically she is alone. She turns.
The image is flat, projected onto a wall, oversaturated. The man is spare to the point of gaunt, more cybernetics than skin. Replacement jaw and replacement joints, all gleaming a muted gray, unmistakable in what they are. He by intention does not wear prosthesis that passes for flesh.
“You recognize me,” he says.
A tell. She must have shown—a flicker of the gaze, a twitch of the mouth. He was not always called Bhanu, not when he was lieutenant to the Warlord of the Mirror. But he has retained his face, his voice, his accent. He’s done nothing to hide who he was. It is a gesture, foolishness or boldness. Given that he has survived, likely the latter. “I’ve heard much about you,” Ovuha says. “If one is in need of work, or hard-pressed to obtain citizenship, it is Bhanu whom one must turn to.”
“You are not from Gurudah. Zero phenotype match, unless you were a designer baby. But Gurudah can’t afford that, can it? Splicing out a few defects, cleaning up inherited diseases, not conjuring up a perfect child off a foreign genetic base. You made a mistake, Ovuha Sui. If Ovuha is even the name you were born with.”
Is he the contact, then, the old Thorn’s accomplice and therefore hers. But she cannot ask, not even to confirm whether he sent the ribbon-fish intermediary. And if she is wrong, then she is standing on the brink. All will fall down and crumble in an instant. “This seems thin evidence on which to build a case that I’m not who I appear to be. I’ve come a long way to reach Anatta, the same as everyone else. We all do what we must to make this voyage. Much as you must have.”
Bhanu continues to study her. On his end she doesn’t doubt he sees more clearly than she does, a gaze that slices through and picks at information in the bend of her jaw, the angle of her cheekbones. The things that make up her dossier. “What you must indeed. With a face like that, I expect you were a favorite of the wardens.” His voice lowers, insinuating, his mouth lifting into a suggestive curve.
In provocation a person’s character may be learned; pushed to fight/freeze/flight, reactions become predictable—the parameters have been narrowed down to a trinary. She returns his smile, returns his gaze. “You are right, I was a favorite to some because I could barter my skills. The value of my face you overestimate, and I am not wise to the crude matter of which you speak.”
“Who,” he says, “are you?”
He must know and this is an act. Or he may not know, and is acting in genuine hostility. “I’m an asylum seeker in whom you’ve decided to take an interest for reasons I cannot discern. Was it because I turned down your offer of protection?”
He cocks his head, avian, and leans forward. She imagines him with a long reptilian neck, a set of beaks glittering like frost. “I’m interested in what you will do. In five minutes, this building will collapse. The detonation starts from the top, this ought to give you plenty of time.”
The image fizzes out. He is not staying to watch her reaction, at least not anywhere she can see. It may be a bluff to measure Ovuha, how gullible she is, how she assesses risk. She lacks the sensors necessary to verify his threat.
She starts moving, calculating the vertical distance, the velocity. It is possible, with minutes to spare if she was on her own. She darts past the defunct elevators into the stairway and looks down the first set of steps. Too slow.
Ovuha vaults over. Anywhere else, safety features would have prevented it. She falls down the next four floors and catches herself on a banister. Her muscles pull taut, a radiance of agony, and she levers herself up. She is breathing harder than she would like, face to face with a startled Suzhen. “Officer, we’ve got to get out now.”
Suzhen looks at her, mouth tight, but does not ask. Willing to humor a potentiate seized by spontaneous panic, perhaps, in the grip of some flashback—fleeing Gurudah, evacuating a ship on the verge of expiring. Ovuha looks down: three minutes and forty seconds left. She doesn’t care to chance it.
She grabs Suzhen and slings the officer over her shoulder. “What—”
“No time.” Ovuha runs, leaps.
The impact is harder, Suzhen’s weight unbalancing her, and she nearly lands face-first on the stairwell. She does not. From above there is a keening of architecture under stress, the scrape of blast doors. Some would drop, others would stutter halfway. Ovuha keeps running: she has no reason to trust the Jasmine’s emergency measures.
They clear the stairway. One last dash as the rooftop crumbles, a hail of façade and building-bones.
In the car, sheltered, their bodies nest in one another’s. Their sweat, their panting, the roar of blood like post-coitus. Ovuha laughs, hoarse and abortive. She presses her head to the glass and watches the spider flowers fall, the spotted ferns, the shredded leaves. Like ashes they are buoyant, resistant to gravity the way human bodies are not. They will drift a long time and will not burst open on the ground.
Chapter Eight
This particular labyrinth of streets, half the world across. This is not where Suzhen belongs; this is not where she wanted to visit again. The jungle city Himmapan. The buildings are broad and photosynthetic, rough brown, bright jade. Floors sprawl like massive boughs, mantled in silver moss. The beauty of Himmapan is in the canopies, the proximity to the sky, the ophidian rooftops where human-faced birds roost. But it is the ground that Suzhen seeks, the footpaths like hard mulch, the shadows like green tar. The sun is far from here.
She passes other pedestrians. Every last one a citizen, luminous and full of purpose. Himmapan has almost no potentiate population. A child sits on an overhead window, feet swinging, cupped safely within the blunt talons of a domestic drone. Safer still within the hand of their guidance. Born citizens get that installed early, toddler years, shorn of privacy before they can speak. It is not without advantages. Down here the child may play and run as they please in perfect security.
Bhanu. The name broke off in Ovuha’s mouth, staccato. You know of him?
He’s a ghost we whisper about at the Bureau. A gossip item. Potentiates need a saint to pray to.
Further away from sunlight still, from the laughing child. The shadows are nearly solid, she can almost grasp them in her hands and coil them around her knuckles. All those years ago, after her mother’s death, this is where she came. She entered a potentiate, emerged a citizen. The site of her rebirth, the site of her remaking. She looks at the unmarked door, crooked, black save for the glints of colorful, polished glass. They are sharper than they look: she knows this from experience, the memory of needlepoint blood on fingertips. But she doesn’t need to touch the door—it parts for her. She steps in, breathing dust. The door shuts and then she is in the dark, her only point of reference a dim illumination ahead and a low, electronic susurrus.
The escalator down is as long as katabasis, as ponderous. She hears gurgling water, the exhalations of fish and abyssal creatures. The light is diffuse, as of heat and sun enfeebled by relentless chill. Bhanu told her that he originally wanted to make this place a memory of the red world and the palace of the Mirror, those infinite corridors and their countless doors. In the end it would have risked too much, he said.