“I did mean it when I said I had the agency to consent,” the warlord says, conversational. “You preoccupied my thoughts, back then. True, I’m more myself now that I’m not pretending to be a hapless refugee. What do you think of that?”
“You’re the Warlord of the Thorn. You can’t possibly care what I think of your personality.”
“On the contrary, in all of Anatta your opinion is the only one that matters.”
Suzhen looks down, wishing she could hide her face—what must be showing on it, as clear for Ovuha and Taheen to read as calligraphy. She remembers a turn of phrase, from a love song or sonnet. Now my heart trips over… “Having that sort of opinion isn’t what I was raised for. My mother and the Mirror, neither of them expected much of me. If things had gone well, I’d have just been another subject of the Mirror’s, nothing extraordinary.”
“I think you’re extraordinary.” Ovuha tucks a strand of hair behind Suzhen’s ear with one gloved knuckle.
“That’s the one thing on which I’ll agree with the warlord.” Taheen makes a noise. “And you’re the child of—well, Klesa informed me, but I didn’t think… none of us are what we seem, in the end.”
Klesa saves Suzhen from having to respond by whispering in her ear that they have reached Himmapan airspace. From the window, all is as it should be: traffic towers alight, trains streaming through the air. In this city of the best and brightest—the citizens with the finest work assignments, the most gorgeous houses—there is never a moment of rest.
They land on a rooftop of burnished boughs and gazebos like enormous papayas, the insides of them bloody and unnervingly organic. Klesa guides them to the least crowded lift, waiting for a window of opportunity to board an empty one. Once they are in, the lift plummets without stopping. Tree-trunk floors and cut-glass windowpanes rush past.
The street gleams like a wet ribbon, immaculate as ever, pearled by circles of sunlight and symbiote cultivars. Delicate belled flowers curl and sprawl along footpaths, their tongues snapping out to catch insects. A Himmapan bird has alighted nearby, broad-winged and large. Its human face jerks back and forth on its long neck; it emits a sharp whistling noise, though the way its gaze roams wildly tells Suzhen it can’t see her, Taheen, or Ovuha. Everything in the cities, organic or replicant, is Samsara’s eyes.
Suzhen comes to the door, Bhanu’s door. It does not part, but something has been left behind for her. She bends close to the scattering of colored glass, arranged in a pattern Bhanu demanded she memorize when she was a child. You better not forget this, even if you have to write it onto your skin. Her mother shushed him, and at home made her reproduce the pattern with grains of rice.
“He’s not here.” She straightens. “I have an idea where to find him.”
Ovuha glances at the whorls and serrated shards. “It seems like bad form to ask who your contact is.”
“Lieutenant Bhanu.”
“Ah. No hard feelings, I hope.”
Taheen snorts. Suzhen doesn’t say that Bhanu will absolutely harbor hard feelings. Instead she consults navigation cached in her datasphere, stored since her previous visit. She’s never met Bhanu in person anywhere else, and she’s always assumed that cavernous horror chamber was where he lived. This will be a first.
It feels surreal to go through a city like a ghost: Klesa guides them to deserted avenues, empty corners, service passages that connect buildings. To her, life on Anatta is one of constant surveillance. No action may be taken, no breath inhaled or exhaled, without her guidance and therefore Samsara bearing witness. Filing away every thought and synaptic pulse to build an image of a person, and then to mold that person into the shape that best fits Samsara’s vision. The idea any relief from the AI’s gaze could exist was unthinkable, outside Bhanu.
The directions she remembers are not entirely certain, but after a couple false starts, she comes to an unassuming complex, insofar as any building in Himmapan can be called that. It has the appearance of an enormous banyan tree, the door gilded in flame motifs. The empty lobby is done in coral and red wood; neither human nor machine receptionist greets them. There is no elevator, only stairs that look like gnarled roots. Blue-white moths flutter in slow circles or cling to the lamps. It takes Suzhen a few seconds to realize they are not particulate projections but actual insects.
Their footfalls echo strangely as they climb. It is a sedate place, gold accents and banisters, more of the indoor flora for which Himmapan is known—fronds dusted in copper and silver, fluted flowers with ombré petals, vines striped in amber and crimson. The higher they go, the surer Suzhen becomes that Bhanu is the sole occupant of this complex.
A strain of music, low and harsh, thin echoes of what plays in Bhanu’s facsimile bar. She follows it to the end of a corridor.
He answers the door and there is something unbearably mundane about him standing there, unchanged and unchangeable. Almost she expected a Deratchan puppet or even Samsara itself, a terrible surprise. He looks past Suzhen and his expression tightens when his eyes settle on Ovuha. “Well. It seems you are not dead after all, Ovuha Sui. Despite the efforts of so many parties.”
Ovuha gives him a salute, sardonically correct. “Lieutenant Bhanu, I believe? Formerly intelligence chief of Vaisravana.”
Bhanu’s gaze moves from Suzhen to Ovuha. His brow furrows when he takes in Taheen. “Come in. You might as well.”
Suzhen doesn’t know what she expected, but it isn’t this. The room is wide, carpeted in soft grass the color of wheat, nearly knee-high. A single window that looks out to a red, red sky and canopy pillars and distant, barren peaks. Her chest contracts.
“How did you even reach me?” Bhanu drops into a gaunt, uncomfortable chair that has unfolded from the wall. “You’re both fugitives. Interior Defense is scouring the earth for you—your images are on broadcasts. There’s a first, a request for citizens to watch out. Very old-fashioned. Not you, Taheen Sahl, though your name will be up there soon enough.”
“Finally,” Taheen murmurs, “fame. All this time I could have been committing felonies instead of designing clothes.”
Ovuha leans against the wall, away from Bhanu. “I expect the reward for turning us in must be substantial. Naturally all citizens are provided for, but some more provided than others, and non-citizens might see themselves promoted to class prime overnight. This stratifying of existence, it has its uses.”
“Warlord of the Thorn.” Bhanu’s mouth draws back. “I assure you that I find the title much less impressive than you imagine.”
“Luckily, on this world that title is meaningless, so I’m not impressed by it either. Also lucky that we aren’t trying to kill each other presently, is that not so?”
He scoffs, the sound a high whistle through the metal that makes up his jaw. “I can be persuaded otherwise. Though for now, we’ll suspend hostilities. Since I’m harboring the three of you, care to enlighten me a little? The warlord being criminal is obvious—her entire existence is illegal—but you, Suzhen? I warned you to stay away from this sordidness. Why is your fashionable friend even involved?”
The chiding tone. Suzhen has thought she was beyond its reproach. “I have my reasons.” And Taheen has theirs, though she can’t begin to imagine what.
“Xinfei spent her life to secure yours.”
Guilt, too, delivered with precision. A fishhook in her gut. “This is not something I’m going to compromise on, Bhanu.”
He sighs. “You can stay here for some time, on one condition. I’ll speak to Ovuha Sui alone.”
The warlord flicks her head. “As you like. I do love to negotiate.”