She waits. A sound of something fragile breaking, down the corridor. Domestic disputes are not uncommon in these places and the walls are not soundproof. Growing up she came to regard the noise as ambient, inevitable. Crying, adult or child. Screaming toddlers. On occasion it spills into the hallway: tearful husbands in disarray, adolescent children storming out, flights of dinnerware. The lives here are both slow—waiting out the probation period, waiting for the next caseworker visit, waiting—and fraught, existence teetering on a cusp, uncertain and unstable. Probationary residency can be snatched away at any time, or so it feels. The state stipend is sufficient but only in the barest of ways, calculated for a definition of enough that leaves no room for food that tastes like food, clothes that make one feel human. This complex is called the Jasmine, a name she finds repulsive in its euphemism, named after a pretty and fragrant flower when the truth of such housing is anything but.
The door opens. Ovuha steps back, her head lowered as if to nullify the twenty-five centimeters she has over Suzhen. The lighting is dim, the window darkened, and the air thick with poor ventilation. A bathroom, a bedroom, a corner partitioned off in pretense that the occupant might get the chance to entertain guests or while away their leisure. But Ovuha has kept it all clean, the mattress and sheets straight, the hard floor smooth and unstained.
It takes a whole moment before she spots the bruises.
They are still new, still red, a patch of blunt trauma down the left side of Ovuha’s face. Her lower lip is split. Now that Suzhen knows what to look for, she realizes Ovuha is also moving oddly, as if recovering from being winded. “You’re going to tell me what happened.”
“It is nothing.”
“I decide whether it is something, potentiate.”
Ovuha smooths her hand over the uninjured side of her face, fingers crooked briefly as though twitching to scratch the bruises. “A spouse from the couple next door. I understand his wife has been abusing him. The dysfunction had to go somewhere.”
“And so you let him vent it on you?” Suzhen opens her briefcase, peels open the first-aid kit. She pulls on sanitizing gloves and squeezes out the protean, spreading it on Ovuha’s jawline, up nearly all the way to her temple. It will reduce inflammation, anesthetize, and speed up healing. A panacea for surface wounds. “Take off your shirt. You were punched or kicked in the gut.”
“This must be the most wholesome context for take off your shirt I’ve ever encountered.” Ovuha unzips the shapeless top.
As Suzhen suspected, another bruise, this one purpling. To the flank rather than to the stomach. She accesses the tracker’s diagnostic: no fracture or broken ribs. Ovuha avoided the worst of the damage, either shielding herself well or dodging while making it seem as though the blow solidly connected. “I wasn’t notified that you were in a physical altercation. You didn’t fight back.”
Ovuha lifts her arm, letting Suzhen coat her flank in protean. She winces slightly at the contact of cold paste on skin. “I didn’t. If you are asking whether I could have, yes, I suppose.”
Suzhen sheds her gloves and steps back. True to her professed history, Ovuha has the physique of someone used to hard labor, to the necessities that keep the body from softening. Detainment pared her down to ribcage and jutting pelvic bones, but still she’s in better shape than most. Ovuha could have handled herself, one on one. “A citizen’s guidance would have prevented that from happening at all.” The first sign of violence would have alerted the nearest Interior Defense drone while the guidance warns the aggressor of the consequences. “I’m not saying you should beat a teenage boy within an inch of his life. But you could have alerted me. If not me, someone will come.”
Ovuha leans back on the bed, her smile warped by hardening, translucent protean. “If not you. Whoever comes wouldn’t necessarily distinguish who began the fight. I wish to keep my head down, officer, and be at my best. It’d be naïve of me to expect your colleagues to be as empathic as you.”
“Don’t accuse me of empathy,” Suzhen says flatly. It may be the dimness, the compressed space—the projects have such mean, tight rooms, every floor partitioned into as many units as possible—but she wishes she was back in the corridor. Noise or not, it is a transitional place. The room is a terminus. “The first-aid kit I’ll leave here. Your attacker will be dealt with by his caseworker, but I don’t want to see a repeat. Next time anyone threatens you, you will report it before it gets physical. How are you settling in otherwise?”
“I’ve made a few acquaintances, though most everyone here keeps to themselves.” A pause. “Aren’t you going to ask whether I’ve pawned off the clothes you bought me?”
“They’re yours to do with as you wish. I also think you’re more sensible than that.”
“I worry,” Ovuha murmurs, “that your kindness would be taken advantage of—but that is not my place. Would you like to see the roof? It’s the building’s best feature.”
Which says little, but she is glad for an excuse to get out. Ovuha shrugs on a loose shirt. The elevator is archaic, stale and rusty-smelling, not because there are no funds allocated to upgrade it but because they are on purpose kept this way. To be a citizen is to deserve; to be a probationary resident is to deserve much less. The privileges, the rights, the ability to experience joy without rationing or compromise.
The rooftop is expansive, an open-air garden. Potted flowerbeds white with arachno-floral hybrids that weave fragrant photosynthetic web, waiting to ambush insects. Trellises in spheres and pyramids, some thinly draped in skeleton vines, others smothered in clouds of fire-roses with cinderous petals and thorns like blasted steel. The result is strange and incoherent but, Suzhen realizes, untouched by AI aesthetic. Samsara’s order does not reach here because it is beneath notice.
The corner Ovuha has claimed is secluded behind spotted ferns. A miniature stone garden—truly miniature, the shelf no longer than thirty-five centimeters—where narrow vases hold stunted trees and braided shrubs. Ovuha’s contribution is a titanium cage, tall and polished, its luster as clean as new bone. The bird inside sports plumage in scarab-blue, each feather hammered to razor thinness. Bronze legs, crimson beaks. It bears no resemblance to hawks or falcons, yet it is good craftsmanship, the sort Suzhen might see in an eccentric’s collection. Quaint and expensive. It trills at her, unmusically.
“It’s lovely,” Suzhen offers, wondering what Ovuha did to acquire it.
“One of the families on my floor can’t speak Putonghua very well. I’m tutoring them here and there, not that I’m much of a teacher. They gave me the bird.” Ovuha opens the cage and extends her wrist for the replicant. “They brought it from their home, a station hidden in an asteroid belt. I don’t know what you call it, but they call the place Wyomere. Destroyed long since, caught in crossfire. The family took the bird apart, smuggled the pieces separately so they wouldn’t be confiscated. A leg held by a child, a wing secreted behind clothes, a gyroscope cluster worn around the neck. Can you imagine? The distance people will go just to keep a memento.”
“And they gave it to a near-stranger?”
“A total stranger.” Ovuha lightly strokes the bird’s back. “They felt I wouldn’t be stolen from and wanted me to keep it as long as I live here. Not an impression I ought to make after I let a scrawny teenage boy beat me up. People are strange, don’t you think?”
People are drawn to strength, either because it is a threat or because they see in it the promise of protection. Suzhen imagines Ovuha through the lenses of the bird’s previous owners, this woman who is so new a potentiate and yet self-contained. At ease within her own skin, despite her status, despite being placed in this gray, worn building. The dignity that does not yield. “What do you want out of your life in Anatta?”