“You’d have beautiful feet,” the painter, Zurun, says. “If only you took better care of them.”
From her vantage point she is unable to see em. Her line of sight is constricted, upside down. What she sees: Atam’s knees, the bottom line of the mezzanine waterfall, a fraction of the window. “Does a corpse need beautiful feet?”
“A corpse needs beautiful everything if it is to be painted.” Zurun clicks eir tongue, a birdlike noise. “Hold on for a little longer and shush.”
Ovuha holds. She watches the water, the unsteady stance of Atam. Zurun’s interest has remained strictly aesthetic, almost clinical. The painter is intrigued by the arches of feet, the edge of cheeks, the exquisiteness of the human skeleton. A fetish for bones. Atam’s fascination is more composite, flesh as well as what scaffolds it, and xie hides that poorly. It amuses Ovuha to be the body on display, objectified twice over. To be witnessed entirely for her stylistic value. She ought to feel outrage.
“All right.” Zurun rises with a rustle of taffeta and articulated dress-joints. Ey tosses eir hair away from the small electrum antlers that decorate eir brow. “You can get up.”
Ovuha stands, too quickly. She waits for the blood in her head to pour down, resettle. The gauze falls away, new-old skin quickly shed. Zurun’s drone collects it. Atam hovers, xer eyes carefully on Ovuha’s face, though she’s caught them veering downward before. “Is there anything else?” Ovuha asks.
Zurun has stepped away from eir canvas. Ey circles it, head bent to the portrait of Ovuha-as-corpse. “Are you allergic to feathers?”
“Not at all.”
“Birdcage,” Zurun muses. “The question is, what kind of bird? What do you think, Atam?”
Xer brow furrows. “A bird of prey?”
“Not very colorful by nature, but maybe it’s the impression that matters. Let me see what I’ve got.” Zurun doesn’t use particulate projection or virtual superimposition. Eir props are real, tangible objects. Ey glides away to eir storeroom, expression turned inward.
Ovuha glances at the waterfall that cascades endlessly from the mezzanine, a pennant of perfect light. Stray droplets have caught in her lashes. “Is ey supposed to poach from Taheen?” Who is out in Zurun’s parlor, snarling at some industry contact, last she saw of them.
Atam twitches, inhaling sharply. “They share models sometimes. Taheen is something of a scout. People they’ve picked out as beautiful and interesting tend to go on to have glamorous careers.”
“What about you?” Ovuha remains bare; she considers arranging herself to best take advantage of shadow and water, the better to entice Atam’s gaze.
“I like being where I am. Steady work, pays well.” A ripple of shoulders. “The industry is full of vipers. Everything is competition, anyone a step above is someone you kiss up today and ruin tomorrow. The slightest disagreement turns into epic feuds. Everyone is incredibly neurotic, they go for five behavior calibrations a month. Taheen is more even-keeled than most and I wouldn’t want to get closer to them than employer and employee.”
“I heard all that,” Zurun says, emerging from eir storage with arms full of feathers. Narrow ones, broad ones, ones with eyes. “Atam isn’t wrong, of course. What do you think? Do you want a career?”
Ovuha cants her head, noncommittal. “I’m more of Atam’s party than anything.”
Zurun’s eyes glaze over as ey searches for anatomical diagrams of birds, selecting references from eir datasphere. Then ey draws on Ovuha with thin, gray ink. Lines of hollow bones, lines of aerodynamics. “I’m not going to affix wings to you,” the painter is saying, “that would be so kitschy. Kinnaree. Hah. Have you ever been to Himmapan?”
Ovuha says no, and lets the painter glue plumage to her body. Feather by feather, coverts and filoplumes. In a moment the suggestion takes shape. Not a kinnaree but wings flaring across her stomach, a lone talon extending from her hip, an avian eye peering from between her breasts. She is a human cage through which a falcon struggles, piecemeal, to burst out and win its freedom.
“Taheen is going to steal this idea when they see it,” Atam murmurs.
The painter waves eir hand. “Let them. As long as they pay my licensing fee. Artistic symbiosis is a lovely, profitable thing.”
Atam looks from Zurun to Ovuha, xer glance conspiratorial. “Doesn’t Ovuha get a small cut? I usually do.”
The painter chortles. “Do you see, being of Atam’s party has its perks. Dry detail and accounting, the things that keep the world on its axis. Yes, she gets a cut. Ovuha, let’s try several poses. I’ll have to chew on the image for a day or two. We’re going to go for saturated colors in the backdrop, I think. Impressionistic maybe.”
Ovuha doesn’t relish the thought of putting on all these props again tomorrow or the day after, but it is as Atam says: the pay is good, the work far from onerous. These are the building blocks, a path toward blending in. She stands with arms spread; she sits curled, fetal, as if to keep the falcon in; she stands on the edge of the mezzanine, limned by water and on the verge of plummet. A variety for Zurun to contrast and record. Ovuha wonders how quickly her face will detach from the images, the design. These portraits are not about the subject but the painter.
They are done. She is given privacy to dress, and in the bathroom—decorated in mermaid shadows and albatross wings—she consults the scrap of code that she finally found by viewing the replicant cardinal through a filter of the neurotoxin map. She closes her eyes, visualizing as she peels the feathers from skin, adhesive coming off in gray rinds. The cardinal’s cipher is unique in that only she and her predecessor know it, told in non-sequitur poetry, using allusions she would recognize but which would be meaningless to anyone else. From it she extracts names. Just four. Two she can recognize, one of them a halfway house warden, the other an Interior Defense captain she occasionally sees on broadcasts. It’s an incomplete list and she’ll need to find more, but all things considered it is adequate. Each name is an investment the old Warlord of the Thorn made, a web of enormous resources to prepare for Ovuha’s arrival on Anatta. Years of conditioning, of altering thought and behavior, of concealing minds inside minds.
Atam visibly relaxes to see her dressed again as she emerges into the parlor. Taheen has finished their acrimonious call with their hapless contact, takes one look at Ovuha and says, “The two of you, are you sleeping together?”
“Taheen,” Atam gasps.
“It’s just that you make it terribly obvious, Atam. Either you’re together or you’d very much like to be.” The couturier turns to Ovuha. “Sorry to be indelicate, but I like to keep ahead of these things among my models. It happens.”
Ovuha adjusts the lapels of her fresh, crisp jacket. “Very mindful of you. If it is true, what would you like to do about it?”
They chuckle over Atam’s spluttering. “Nothing. Just do let me know if it goes south, please, so I can separate you. These things can sour a working environment, the two of you being so professionally involved, and I’m your primary employer.”
“I will keep it in mind.”
They leave Taheen to discuss artistic symbiosis and licensing agreements with Zurun. In the elevator—a long way up to the nearest train station, Zurun’s studio being in a lower stratum—Atam exclaims, “I can’t believe Taheen said that. I’d never even seen you naked until today and it’s in a professional context!”
“It did seem unnecessary,” Ovuha says, “though admittedly they have a point.” Pettily expressed, even so, tactless—a little spiteful. She doesn’t think it is because Taheen has an opinion one way or another where Atam finds xer carnal delights. More likely it is to do with Ovuha and Ovuha’s presence in Suzhen’s life. The glimmer of feeling she’s witnessed when Taheen speaks of Suzhen. “Would you have preferred that I deny it?”