The nation of Liris curled around its interior courtyard as though doubled up in pain. Every window stared down at that courtyard. Every balcony overhung it. The bottom of this well would be in permanent shadow if not for the giant mirrors mounted on the roof, which were aimed at Candesce.
Venera could plainly see that the courtyard was the focus of everything—but she couldn't see what was down there. For the first two days of her stay she was shuttled from small room to small room, all of them lined up in a short hallway painted institution green. After a brief interview in each chamber she was taken back to a drab waiting room, where she sat and ate and slept fitfully on the benches. She was startled awake every morning by a single gunshot sounding somewhere nearby. Morning executions?
It seemed unlikely; she was the sole inhabitant of this little prison. Prison it clearly was. She had to fill out forms just to use the one washroom, a cold cube with wooden stalls defaced by centuries of carven graffiti. Its high, grated windows gave her a view of the upper stories of the inner courtyard. They hinted at freedom.
"B-b-back to waking?” Venera sat up warily on the third morning and tried to smile at her jailor.
He was tall, athletically muscled, and possessed the sort of chiseled good looks one saw in actors, career diplomats, or con artists. As dapper as could be expected for a man dressed in iron and creaking leather, he might have melted any lady's heart—provided she never looked in his eyes or heard him speak. Either of those maneuvers would have revealed the awful truth about Moss: his mind was damaged somehow. He seemed more marionette than man and, sadly, appeared to be painfully aware of his deficit.
Just as he had yesterday, Moss carried a stack of forms in one hand, bearing it as though it were a silver platter. Venera sighed when she saw this. “How long is it going to take to process me into your prison?” she asked as he clattered to a stop in front of her.
"P-p-prison?” Moss gaped at her. Carefully, as though they were gold, he placed the papers on the peeling bench. His metal clothing gnashed quietly as he straightened up. “You're n-not in p-p-prison, my lady."
"Then what is this place?” She gestured around at the sound-deadening plaster walls, the smoke-stained light sconces and battered benches. “Why am I here? When do I get my things back?” They'd gone through her jacket and taken its contents—jewelry, key, and bullet. She wasn't sure which loss worried her most.
Moss's face never changed expression as he spoke, but his eyes radiated some sort of desperate plea. They always did, even if he was staring at the wall. Those eyes seemed eloquent, but Venera was beginning to think that nothing about Moss's looks or demeanor meant anything about his inner state. Now he said, in his intensely flat way, “This is the im-immigration department of the g-g-government of Liris. You were brought here to't-t-take your citizenship-ip exams."
"Citizenship?” But now it all made sense—the forms, the sense of being processed, and the succession of minor officials who'd taken up hours of her time over the past days. They had grilled her mercilessly, but not about how or why she had come here, or about what her plans or allegiances might be. They didn't even want to know about her peeling sunburns. No, they'd wanted to know the medical histories of her extended family, whether there was madness in her line (a question that had made her laugh), and what was the incidence of criminality among her relatives.
"Well, my father stole a country once,” she had answered. She had of course asked them to let her go, in perhaps a dozen different ways. Her assumption was that she would be ransomed or otherwise used as a bargaining chip. With this in mind, she had sat anxiously for hours, wondering about her value to this or that state or person. It had never occurred to Venera that she might be adopted by Liris as one of its own.
Now as she realized what was going on, Venera had one of the strangest moments of her life. She felt, for just a second, relief at the prospect of spending the rest of her life hidden away here, like a jewel in a safe. She shook herself, and the moment passed. Disturbed, she stood and turned away from Moss.
"B-b-but the news is good,” said Moss, who looked like he was begging for death as he said it. “D-don't fret. You have p-p-passed all the't-t-tests so far. J-just one set of forms to g-go."
Venera gnawed at her knuckle, each bite sending little pulses of pain up her jaw. “What if I don't want to be a citizen of Liris?"
Moss proceeded to laugh, and Venera swore to herself she would do anything to avoid seeing that again. “F-Fill these out,” he said. “A-and you're done."
It wasn't eagerness to become a citizen of a nation the size of a garden that made her sign the papers. Venera just wanted to get her things back—and get out of the waiting room. What she'd felt a moment ago was just a craving for anonymity, she told herself. Citizenship of any nation meant nothing to her, except as a sign of lowly status. Her father was hardly a citizen of Hale, after all; he was Hale, and other people were citizens of him. Venera had grown up believing she, too, was above such categories.
"Come,” was all Moss said when she was finished. He led her out into the hallway, and at its end, he unlocked the great metal door with its wire-mesh window. Before pushing the portal open, he picked up an open-topped box and held it out to her.
Inside were the necklace and earrings he'd confiscated from her jacket when she arrived. Rolling next to them was her bullet.
The key to Candesce was not there.
Venera frowned but decided not to press the matter just now. Moss gestured with one hand and she edged past him into her new country.
Shafts of dusty sunlight silhouetted tall stone pillars. Their arched capitals were muted in shadow, but the polished floors gleamed like mirrors. Save for a wall where the edge of the courtyard should be, the whole bottom floor of the great cubic building seemed open. Filling the space were dozens and dozens of cubicles, desks, worktables, and stalls.
Indeed, it seemed as if all the roles of a midsized town were duplicated here—tailor over here, doctor there, carpenters on this side, bricklayers on that—but all gathered in one room. Bolts of cloth were stacked with bags of cement. Drying racks and looms had been folded up under the ceiling to make way for chopping blocks and flour-covered counters. And working in determined silence throughout this shadow-cut space was a small army of silent, focused people.
Each was isolated at some chair or desk, and Venera had the startled impression that these work stations had grown up and around some of the people, like shells secreted around water creatures. It must have taken years for that man there to build the small ziggurat of green bottles that reared above his desk; nearby a woman had buried herself in a miniature jungle of ferns. Mirrors on stands and hanging from strings cunningly directed every stray beam of light within ten feet at her green fronds. Each position had its eruption of individuality or downright eccentricity, but their limits were strictly kept; nobody's keepsakes and oddities spilled beyond an invisible line about five feet in radius.
Moss led her to an outer wall, where he opened a dim chamber that reminded her of Diamandis's warren. Here were crates and boxes full of what looked like armor—except she knew it for what it was. “You are required to wear four hundred and fifty p-p-pounds of mass during the day,” said Moss. “That will offset our r-reduced g-gravity and maintain the health of your bones.” He stood back, arms crossed, while Venera rooted through the mess looking for something suitable.
It seemed that Spyre's tailors were an unimaginative lot. The room contained an abundance of blouses, dresses and skirts, pants and jackets, but all were done in intricately tooled and hinged metal. Only undergarments—those directly in contact with the skin—were made of suppler materials, mostly leather, though to her relief she did find some cloth. Venera tried on a vest made of verdigrised copper scales, added a skirt made of overlapping iron plates and weighed herself. Barely one hundred pounds. She went back and found greaves and wrist bracers, a platinum torque, and a steel jacket with tails. Better, but still too light. Moss waited patiently while she layered herself like a battleship. Finally when she topped the scales at one hundred pounds weight—five hundred pounds mass—he grunted in satisfaction. “B-but you need a h-h-hat,” he said.