She touches bottom. There is flat ground, and no more escalator.
The way ahead is cavernous, ceiling and walls glistening. Ossified eyes gaze down at her, track her movement, clicking as they rotate in their sockets.
Music, slow and seismic. A packed dance floor, ground fog up to Suzhen’s waist, made of perfume and cigarette stink. Figures gyrate, slashed by harsh light, jostling each other and pushing toward center stage. She flinches and avoids as best she can the slightest contact. Around her desultory conversation seethes in different languages, a multitude of patois.
The bar is a crescent, circumscribed by high jagged stools like upholstered stalagmites. There is no one behind the bar, only a constellation of glasses. Each is delicately blown and gorgeous and fractured, a crack in the stem, a fragment chipped off the rim. She pushes herself onto a seat and lays her hands flat on the countertop. It is immaculate, without the stains of glasses and cups, without the stickiness of spilled drink. This is not because it is kept clean: it is because the bar has never been used at all. “Bhanu,” she says.
The music changes and accelerates into something with teeth, hurting her eardrums. The light changes. If she turns around, she’ll see clearly that the dancers are not human but fleshy, faceless mannequins with the bloated, wriggling skin of corpses giving nest to maggots. She does not turn around.
Someone joins her, taking up the seat adjacent. Across the bar two specters resolve from the ground fog and the jangled illumination: a copy of her, a copy of him.
“Thank you for making time for me.”
“I always make time for you.”
She glances at him and discovers he didn’t send a mannequin. It is him, in the flesh. The years have passed Bhanu by without bruising or creasing him. The ageless metal parts, the tight skin. He does not look young, but he didn’t look young when she and her mother arrived. Her mother aged and weakened while Bhanu didn’t. For this she will always resent him.
Across the bar their phantoms sip drinks and talk, but differently. Weather, politics, the shape of Himmapan. Where is the newest gallery, does he have recommendations, what does he think of that arena sport. This will be what her guidance witnesses and records, its senses fooled by the convolution of interference and duplicates and decoy signals. Bhanu has only ever deployed it twice before, once for her mother speaking with him, another time for Suzhen speaking with Xinfei. To give mother and child a moment, tremulous, of total privacy. A veil Samsara may not penetrate, is not even aware exists.
“Ovuha Sui,” Suzhen says.
“Is not who she says she is.”
Her fist closes. “What of it?” Neither is she, neither is Bhanu.
“I expect she’s a little like us. She was somebody. And that makes her fraught. You’d do well to make her someone else’s problem.”
She remembers how easily Ovuha carried her, the tremendous strength. The way Ovuha handled the situation like someone with combat experience. “I was in that building.”
“Not within blast radius, not in a spot at risk of structural integrity. I’d never harm you. My duty to my lord didn’t end when she fell. It is forever, or at least until you die of old age.” His simulacrum makes a joke and laughs, too loudly. “But you’re making this duty unnecessarily difficult.”
“She came into my care. I’d prefer you don’t try to kill her.” Arson, explosives. What next.
He draws a wine flute down from overhead, as simply as picking a ripe fruit. He turns it in his hand. There is nothing to pour into it, though she expects Bhanu can produce liquor from beneath the counter, or through sleight of hand. “She poses a unique risk to you. I don’t need to belabor why. My lord bade me ensure you not only survive but thrive. This woman, whoever she was, gets in the way of that.”
“Tell me what you think she used to be.”
“It would be useful to find out, but it would be more expedient to simply do away with her. A foot soldier, a pilot, an officer. Who knows. She might have deserted or her lord was vanquished. Coward, either way.”
This is the one concession, the one point for which she cannot hate Bhanu. His desire was to stay to the end, at the Mirror’s side. You would die for me, the warlord told him while Suzhen eavesdropped. Yes, my lord, he most likely said. Good. Now I command you to live for me. That will be harder, I think. But I trust in your resilience.
Born to serve, dedicated wholly to it, and his lord turned him away. He would have done anything for the Mirror and this, as she said, was the hardest.
“I’ve never thought of her as my parent.”
Bhanu stares at her, silent.
“To me, as to you, she was the lord.” Of that red world, of all that Suzhen knew. Whether she saw the Mirror unmasked, whether the Mirror was tender to her, all that was beside the point. “If I have Ovuha transferred to another agent, would you leave her be?”
“I will refrain from having her killed.”
It is a compromise. It is not one she will accept. “Not good enough. If so, I’ll keep her with me until her six months are out, and your next attempt is going to either kill me too or maim me for life.”
Bhanu puts the wine flute down, spinning it on the countertop. It rolls, making brittle harmonics. “Even if I don’t do anything, keeping her with you will either kill or maim you regardless because of the trouble she attracts. She is at least willing to put you out of harm’s way, so she may not be entirely honorless.”
What is honor, Suzhen thinks, amazed that he still talks of this intangible philosophy. But she’s achieved her preferred result; she may not be entirely honorless is a concession. Bhanu will leave Ovuha alone, for now. “She’s a person of function. And very human, for all that.”
“Empathy isn’t a virtue you can afford. Even this world doesn’t teach this thing as a virtue.” Another clink. The glass whirls, dangerously close to the edge. “You would think they would. Empathy sounds like it should be the natural enemy of violence.”
“It isn’t.” One can have empathy for select human beings and regard the rest as parasites. It is the simplest compartmentalization in the universe, this dividing and sub-dividing of other people, the way Anatta’s system already does for them. Suzhen expects Nattharat holds empathy for her children, her husband.
Bhanu doesn’t comment. “Are you in need of anything?”
She is in need of peace and certainty, but those are not commodities he can secure. He is powerful enough to acquire citizenship, the most expensive luxury there is, but he cannot purchase or bargain for contentment. “I’m fine. Looking into a career change, and I can handle that myself.” A few application forms sent and by the time Ovuha has completed her probation, Suzhen will have a new post waiting that suits her inclinations and abilities. Samsara provides.
“Good. Get away from this. I’ve never thought,” he adds, “that you resembled the lord in any way. Power is cultivated, not inherited.” He leans forward and the specters dissipate, closing off a conversation about fusion food.
It is half an insult. Suzhen was never trained to succeed the warlord. She still doesn’t know why she was conceived, other than as a whim, the Mirror’s whim to create a family. And love, perhaps there was that, making even warlords into fools.
Suzhen did not ask her mother whether love was a factor, a variable in the red world’s equation.
The domain of the Mirror was called Vaisravana. A heartbreaking name, she used to think.
Tatters of gauze, white, across Ovuha: lateral to her torso, scattered over her thighs and ankles like discarded paper, shriveled lilies. She lies as an injured body, the bed slanted so that her head points lower than her feet. She is naked. Atam stands to the side and gazes, avid, almost trembling.