Not that she’s encountered any danger. She turns the window transparent. Even at night, camouflage toggled off and the light on, the pane remains clean. The forest is an ecological largesse, overgrowths and fruits and floral cascades: she can’t escape the orchids. But in fauna there is almost nothing except a few lizards. No insect specks her window, no snake offers her threat, and no predators—of the earth or the air—fill the night with noise or leave carcasses on the ground. The only dead that have crossed her path are the pieces of Samsara, and she’s been here two weeks.
Here even the voice of her guidance is silent: it does not nag her with running commentary on her health, her psyche, her social life or lack of it. She is alone entirely, unmonitored, and with enough supplies to last several months if properly rationed. Well-equipped, well-housed, surrounded by a forest as large and safe as it is bounteous. She could.
Restless, she leaves the cabin again. Evening will fall soon, but she has been out at night before and knows there’s nothing to fear, with or without a defensive cluster as her second shadow. Or the gun at her hip, which she’s never had to draw. A part of her thought this would be an adventure. What it turns out to be is slightly dull, slightly unsettling, an idea more than a location. Utopic: the temptation of a place on Anatta where Samsara has no presence save as sundered ghosts.
She cants her head, listening for noises. Cicadas, owl hoots. The primate brain associates those sounds with a place like this, yet there is nothing in this half-complete ecosystem. According to the mapping data there is a stream nearby, though she hasn’t come across it yet. Shadows lengthen as she ventures further east, away from her camp and the places where she last found the machine-corpses. She has slowed her exploration down lately, though it was never very fast, on foot. She wants to feel anticipation still, nursing the possibility that when she passes the next ruin mantled in moss and rounds a corner, she’ll find an impossible vision that has, all this time, hidden in plain sight. A secret world, a secret country. What shape that might take she doesn’t even know. But she’d recognize it when she sees it.
Her feet sink into dead leaves and black-green loam, and high above, the orchids haunt the air. Large as her fists, tiny as pearls, green and yellow and shocking magenta. Unpatterned, leopard-spotted, wildly stamped like peacock tails. It is unnatural in variety, a garden cultivated for aesthetic pleasure.
Suzhen stops by what used to be a shrine. The style is familiar to her, a miniature house with gilded finials and tiny red windows. Most of the color has faded but she recognizes what the paint must have been like before. She peers through. Empty, colonized by a yellow froth of strangleweed. It is a shrine that might have been raised on Vaisravana, though then again she sees similar ones in Himmapan or Indriya. Cultural drift has occurred but common roots remain. Samsara of the forest built this far, making religious icons for either the pretend-humans that were Samsara’s fragments, or to prepare for humankind’s return.
What it is like to be enslaved by that, held in thrall to helpless love for creatures that were so out of reach they might as well have gone extinct. For so long, for that immeasurable span.
Now she hears it, the sound of running water.
She peels off her mask, tosses back her hood, for the first time inhaling without reservation the scent of wet grass. She kicks off her boots. The stream cuts through the land like a brilliant blade, by chance or ancient design unshaded by canopy or orchids: the currents catch the setting sun. She kneels by the soft bank and tries to judge how deep the water is, how safe. The flow is steady but not fast. She dips one foot into the water, keeps stretching until she hits bottom. Waist-deep. She flexes her toes in the mud, pushes against the pebbles. This calms her, stills her from inside as if she too is made of water.
Upstream she goes, wading. It is good to have something to strain against, proof that she can still exert herself upon the world, even if it’s merely this tame current and silt. She could keep going forever, she thinks, until her skin sloughs off and her insides reveal themselves to be of this element: one with the stream, like a naga woman or river spirit.
Her foot meets resistance. Hard, cold. A boulder submerged and worn to ceramic smoothness perhaps, only the shape isn’t right. Suzhen moves to put her mask back on but instead takes a vast draw of air, diaphragm wide, lungs filling. She thrusts her arms in, dives under. It is not difficult to dislodge—what she seizes is slender, not too heavy, and the mud is soft and giving.
She emerges, gasping, with a child’s body in her arms.
Her first instinct is to throw it back in but cognition takes over; she knows what this is, it can be nothing else. This is not the corpse of a child—that would have dissolved long ago. She pushes her way to the bank, lays the body down upon the gloaming grass. The hair has shed, sluiced away with the water, gone to decay. What is left is a skull pale as china, as flawless and naked. She touches and finds it as yielding as fontanel. Most of the features have faded, but this was well-made, crafted with maternal care—or selfish care, she thinks between hard, shallow breaths.
The general outline, nose and mouth and jaw, remain as defined as the day this face was made. One empty eye socket, the other filled with a milky pebble. A painfully small body, modeled on a child of six or eight, and not a well-fed one. There is no resemblance to what she has seen, either on the days of blessing or in Peace Guard footage. Obvious what this is, all the same. She has found it, one of the child Samsara, the diminutive empress of this dead country, this half-made garden.
Chapter Thirteen
A strange madness falls upon the camp, after.
No one expects the Thorn to be in their midst, incarcerated and under control of the Bureau: it is too mundane a fate, too risible a turn of chance. They are re-interrogated regardless. People are pulled out of dormitories, out of the cafeteria, out of the infirmary. The picks are random, the timing is likewise, and some inmates don’t come back. While no one knows where the disappeared went to, most speculate it is Vaisravana. The red world is spoken of like an execution chamber, the final karmic weight.
Even a warlord might not survive such a place.
Ovuha does not change her behavior. She considers whether she could last on Vaisravana, keep on for a few months, but it seems unlikely that anyone who’s been transferred there will ever be sent back to Anatta. And while she could survive there longer than some, it’d destroy her chance at her objective.
The other option—the only option—will require careful planning. The right time, the right person.
At seven exactly, curfew begins and all lights turn off: their time is regulated more strictly than in any creche, and they are regulated more closely than toddlers. Routines within the camp serve to discipline, deprive control, and finally to infantilize. In the dark, her dorm-mates toss and turn and cough, and Ovuha thinks of her strategies. The precision she will require against a dwindling timeline.
Her thoughts wheel inevitably to the Comet, transfixed by that moment of annihilation, that final gesture. Perhaps it is part of the script but she does not think so. In spite of what the Warlord of the Comet has done to her—all too willingly, if they must go then they will take her down with them—she thinks of the gun, the trigger: that is what Ovuha would have done herself to avoid the sentence. Years in captivity while Samsara wrings it all out of her, the secrets, the names of ships and the statistics and the routes. Better to go at a time of one’s choosing; a bullet is seductive. How the Comet learned that Ovuha infiltrated Anatta is another matter, but it is irrelevant. Information is a human thing and therefore impossible to make watertight. Control of it is illusory and transient.