“He’s not working for Pax Americana.” Orfea rests her hand on another mermaid’s head, this one blonde and blue-eyed, its iron breasts bared to the world. “I’ve got a good idea of his temperament; if he was involved in this, he’d have been more openly smug. That’s not a man who hides his feelings or who knows how to dissemble. Though he does hate haruspices, yes. Envious. Probably he’d like it if all of them self-destruct while he’s made a candidate.”
Krissana sneers. “He’s not likely to get approved. Why don’t we check in with the ambassador, see what they think?”
The connection is established instantly, Seung Ngo’s image shimmering into existence, superimposed on the creaking, oxidized fish tails and chipped human faces. Seung Ngo can no doubt handle dozens of other tasks simultaneously—and most likely is—but they must have allotted a high-priority thread to this meeting. “Khun Khongtip. Dr. Leung.” They don’t ask what Krissana and Orfea have been doing, what questions have been seeded and what answers have been harvested; Seung Ngo can review surveillance feeds, know everything they have done and said, may well have been observing in real time. “I am in accord with your conclusion on McDonald Kenneth. He is not aware of it, but his connections to Shenzhen’s public network are not just closely monitored, they’re contained. There’s little chance of him being a vector.”
“Why not just throw him out?” Krissana crosses her legs, balancing herself on the mermaid’s back.
Seung Ngo lifts their hand to one of the mermaids, this one much defaced, half its features missing. “There isn’t sufficient cause and we deal fairly with those who’ve come to us for shelter, regardless of their background. You of all people would know that. What I will offer is this. There is ongoing discussion on the parameters of AIs who arose from machines—like me—and AIs who arose from haruspices, such as the one who’ll join with you, Khun Khongtip. Objectively there is no difference, we might even say the difference does not exist. And so we do, and that renders it no longer there; the difference is gone. Within the Mandate, we achieve reality through consensus.”
“Who,” Krissana says suddenly, “is Benzaiten in Autumn?”
“The answer to that would be complex. I’ll see if we can discuss, internally, what we’ll do with the . . . resurfacing of that name.”
What happens when you’re not in accord, Orfea wants to ask, but the connection has already shut down. The image dissipates. She stares at the vacancy it has left behind, as though she can divine meaning from the silver motes. “Factions in the Mandate,” she says, “disagree with creating new members through haruspices.”
“That doesn’t bode well.” Krissana drops to her feet. “For me particularly. But does that mean the American was right? That this came from within?”
“I don’t think Seung Ngo was saying that precisely. They were trying to explain AI consensus. They aren’t a hivemind, but to carry out decisions they have to abstract disagreement. Or to align facts so that more than one truth is possible, or . . . ” There’s an element of democracy, but some votes weigh more than others. And not all of us loved their humans. Something strikes her, suddenly, the epiphany like an avalanche. “It’s not the haruspices. They weren’t the ones who—”
Chapter Five
Gunfire. In these ruins it seems louder than it should be, a whiplash of sound ripping through salt-rich air, through the ghosts of what this place might have been on another world. A singer’s childhood in a valley between ivory cliffs, solo performances under the cold dark, a woman recently dead or reduced to ashes decades past.
Krissana draws her gun. The noise came from the direction they left behind—McDonald’s home. She takes stock of the acoustics, the lingering echoes. The shots were not fired by anything McDonald would have in his possession. “Someone’s trying to kill the American.” She relaxes a fraction, though doesn’t holster her pistol. “I wish them the very best. For all I know, they’ve already been successful. Why don’t we evacuate the area and leave it to Public Safety?”
“No,” Orfea says. “If someone wants him dead just after he spoke to us, we’re going to find out why.”
“It’s a good thing I like to think of you as my de facto commander.” Flippantly said, though Krissana means it. She scans the area: it is isolated enough that they don’t need to worry about bystanders, though by now Public Safety AIs must have reached the scene. In Shenzhen, response is instant: AI proxies are everywhere, can be dispatched to the site of violence at a moment’s notice. Unless it is Public Safety arresting the American—she consults her overlays, but no alert is active, no warning that civilians should avoid the area.
Being armed—and far more durable—she takes point, heading back the way they came. She scales a stone wall and effortlessly pulls Orfea up with her: between them she’s shorter, but these days there’s more heft to her, density gathered in her bones and muscles. Strength comes to her easily, as though she has always been capable of these feats. It is a haruspex advantage that she enjoys, how sublime it is to exist in this body, how it fits her will like a glove.
The garish house is soon in sight: another gunshot rings out, the ammunition a different caliber this time. Krissana gestures at Orfea to stay back. She approaches from the wall and vaults onto a balcony in time to see a tall, heavyset person advance on McDonald. With something between intuition and machine resonance, she knows that they are a haruspex candidate, like her. They drop with a bullet wound gaping in their stomach, a sanguine magnolia.
The American whips around, his gun swinging to point at Krissana. Like him it is oversized, the barrel long and golden. Hot from discharge: she can perceive in thermal when she wants to. “Another one? I should tell you what kind of bullets this beauty fires.” He sneers. “Brings down a horse. At this range, it doesn’t matter and I don’t think you’d appreciate the . . . technical specs. But you should know this doesn’t leave behind a pretty corpse.”
“I’m not here to shoot at you.” Krissana grudgingly switches to English; watches disbelief cross his face the way an insect scuttles across a ruined crag. “Not yet, at any rate. Don’t tempt me, Mr. American.”
He takes in her pistol, evaluating its size and apparent power. The sneer widens. It gives him a look of animal cunning. “So you aren’t here to kill me—though I’d like to see you try, little girl. What then? Where’s the doctor?”
A pre-haruspex was sent to eliminate him, she thinks, not an AI. Candidates are disposable enough, depending on where they are from and what they have been promised. And who gave those promises. Public Safety hasn’t arrived and, she’s certain, never will. “Why do you think you were targeted? Did you know that person?” The vicinity has been cleared out: none of McDonald’s neighbors are present, and the residential block here is dense enough there should be some—adolescents playing, adults with heads bent close to share gossip. It is empty except for a child perched on a high fence, legs dangling. Thirteen or fourteen, crimson-skinned, with small horns on their forehead. They are oriented in McDonald’s direction, neither alarmed nor running away.
“No.” McDonald spits on the ground. “Never seen him in my life.”
Krissana keeps an eye on the child. “Who did you piss off recently?”
“You? The doctor?” He has not lowered his gun. “The Mandate?”
For speculating that the suicides resulted from an internecine dispute: a theory that may approach the truth too closely for the Mandate’s comfort. But why this, in broad daylight, as unsubtle as an orbital strike. Disposing of McDonald is simpler than that, there are ways far more efficient or more official. No. There’s something else, a more elusive motive. “That’s not it. Come with me, we’ll see if we can get you—”
She is gripped by an unmooring, the park and the sea behind it flattening to a mural, the child to inert figure captured in oil.
It passes, fizzing at the edge of her senses. The child has dropped from their perch, stretching this way and that as if to work the cricks from their joi
nts. Their limbs unfold, keep unfolding, and when they stand at their full height it becomes clear they are no child. Too tall. Too elongated. The mouth too wide, full of teeth like a shark’s.
The distance between there and here seems to fold. McDonald on the ground. The creature leaping toward him, one arm rippling into a gleaming crescent: an exquisite edge, made white by the sun’s glare. He shoots once, twice, in quick succession. Neither shot connects, going wide or perhaps passing through the AI proxy as if it is a ghost.
When the proxy lands it is like poetry, a grace of trajectory so exact that it looks preordained: that written into the universe’s fabric and its attendant symmetries was the death of this man, meant to occur at this instant and in this manner. The curved blade shears through meat and fat, through the ropes of tendons and the columns of bones. From shoulder to hip the man is opened, pouring forth a revelation of anatomy, of alimentary tides—what once simmered within and ferried sustenance from heart to cerebrum. Not any longer. The grossness of lymph and bile, emptied onto the sand.
The AI cuts what is left of McDonald with the same precision that ended him, slicing through his face and levering wide the skull: a crack resounds. They retract their blade arm, returning it to many-jointed digits. With those the AI pries off a piece of brain, a knot of spinal cord, their attached implants. Coolant geysers at each severing, connectors guttering out.
They stand and hold up a fistful of McDonald’s organs, glistening and dripping between their fingers. When Krissana does not react, they frown and make that handful disappear into their chassis. They shake the fluids off their fingers, fastidious, and step away from the eviscerated corpse.
She lowers her gun—it would do her little good, and she has no intention of provoking the AI. They look over their shoulder one more time, locking eyes with her, and the ground beneath her distends. The balcony bends as though under terrible pressure; the glass door behind her creaks.
Krissana leaps clear, a hairsbreadth before the balcony collapses. Architecture folds into itself, supports and load-bearing points crumpling: the house’s death throes are louder than the gunshots were.
By the time the dust clears, the AI is long gone.
An emergency ward. Krissana is more damaged than she thought; a nurse picks glass out of her wounds, grit and brick dust. There was confusion during patient intake, the problem of what she is and therefore which grade of personnel should service Krissana—her mods are too extensive, her implants too startling: they mark her with otherness, further along than most pre-haruspices. Idly she imagines what it would have been like if she’d been in critical condition, whether this ambiguity would have killed her. Most probably.
They are left alone in a private room. Cream floor and pastel sheets: like any other hospital it is decorated with the assumption the patient is very young, very fragile, or both. Flowery ceramics in a corner, in various hues of pink. Krissana wonders if there’s ever been behavioral research on how the effect is murderous on the soul, weaponized blandness, but perhaps the point of hospitals is to preserve the flesh to the exclusion of all else. The windowpane throws back her reflection. She is a diagram of wounds, lacerations livid behind the clear chitin of medical sealant, as if offering instruction to medical students.
“What happened?” Orfea is sitting on the bed, a cup in her lap, empty: she has not deigned to sample hospital teabags.
“Mandate AIs can manipulate Shenzhen’s structures at will.” Krissana holds up her hands, fingers splayed; she is whole, for now. “This one decided to collapse a balcony from under me. They killed the American and took his brain implants. It was really quite barbaric, for Shenzhen.” The question, then, has gone past why but what. What dwelled within McDonald’s cerebral cortex, what hid inside those implants. A trove of mysteries.
“That’s one way of putting it.” A small pause. “I think it’s time you tell me why you want to become this. There are perks. There are privileges. But I never thought you’d consent to become state property.”
It is a jab. It is also not untrue. She makes her shoulders unwind, forces the tension to seep out of her like febrile sweat. She wishes she had a change of clothes, armor that’d make her look seamless and invincible. “I don’t see how it’s relevant.” Then she sighs. “There’s the obvious. I have a lot of history, and as a haruspex I get to start over, clean slate. And then there’s . . . I was a sickly child. Lots of hospital stays, months at a time. I learned the limits of the human body earlier than most people.” And grew to resent it by the time she was ten, twelve. Its countless flaws, the infinite ways in which it can fail. An organ collapses; tendons inflame and atrophy; valves spin too fast or too sluggishly. Collectively, a weak apparatus.
“I can appreciate that.” Orfea glances down, as if to assess her own mortality, the fragility of her components. “I don’t know if it’s worth—but you’ve thought it through, weighed the balance. Whether it is worth the trade.”
Krissana turns down the window’s opacity until it is at half transparency, enough to see the hospital’s courtyard, its expanse of green and gazebos. “Ambassador Seung Ngo’s not answering.” Expected: the circumstances are too unusual, and there was that evasion. The answer to that would be complex. “Before we heard the shot, you were saying something. That it wasn’t the haruspices themselves.”
“I was trying to think of what the three haruspices who committed suicide could have had in common. I don’t expect you’ll reveal to me the process of initiating a haruspex. But would I be right in guessing that each candidate has their own AI to midwife them into the Mandate?”
“Roughly speaking.” She wouldn’t say midwife precisely, though there are candidates who use such language, who indulge in mystique: their AI handlers are psychopomps, spirit mediums, godly guides. Seung Ngo is hers, not that they are much given to intimacy; they are businesslike and she prefers it that way. Ambassador, the formal title, is as far as she will go.
“I can’t verify such a thing,” Orfea goes on, “but if I had the clearance, I imagine I might find that the suicides were all inducted by the same AI.”
“Yes, that’s—”
“Obvious. What’s oblique is . . . ” Orfea purses her lips, then forges on, no doubt aware that lowering her voice is useless. Even the ciphered language employed by Amaryllis agents—or any other code, verbal or signed—would be cracked within minutes. Down to which AI is paying attention at the time, and at least one would be. “What did the American nearly tell us? But it’s not what he almost said, is it, and could the timing really have been a coincidence? Here’s a theory. What if the conversation’s already over? What if they’ve already decided haruspices are no longer necessary? That’s the only way the suicides were allowed to self-destruct—they’re treasured commodities otherwise.”
Unease pricks her. She eyes the window and the door, watching for a red shadow with arms like blades. “Then what.”
“I wonder how much we can really be seen, how closely they’re able to monitor us. And why we’ve been permitted to act.” The doctor stands and extends a hand to her. “Let’s go home.”
“Yours or mine?”
Orfea arches an eyebrow. “Mine, if it’s not too humble. I’m getting used to you being there.”
Much as it pains her, Krissana commands no greater insight into internal Mandate politics than Orfea does. She isn’t privy to it and will not be until she fuses with an AI. At this juncture she is only given what Seung Ngo is willing to disclose, and they are parsimonious. The one allowance they make for her is letting her activate more implants than she is officially permitted—her combat augments are unavailable to other candidates. And that owes not to Seung Ngo favoring her, she realizes, but anticipating that Krissana will be in situations that require violence or at least self-defense. Like today.
The walk through the waystation goes without event. The tram ride goes likewise. Around them the crowds behave as they always do, people busy with their own routines, deep inside
their own heads or deep in conversation; there is no acknowledgment of what happened in Dameisha. Krissana catches some chatter, in person and in virtuality, about the suicides. Speculation, morbid interest, but little panic. As if they believe it has nothing to do with them, or that it is under control and will be sorted out swiftly by the Mandate. Rulers that act without pity or bureaucratic delay, infallible and omnipotent: that is the common view and, for the moment, unshakable.
Orfea’s apartment remains as they left it, in a state of quiet domesticity—Krissana half-expected it to have been thrown into disarray, taken apart and rifled through, but the Mandate doesn’t need to stoop to such things.
The doctor puts on music, sad jazzy tunes, lyrics in Cantonese and the occasional Japanese. Sultry vocals fill the room like oodh. For a time they sit in silence.
“When we were in the Armada,” Orfea says, “I thought you lived like a weapon. That attracted me. To have that clarity of thought and action. To enjoy total confidence that the Amaryllis banner provided a perfect path, that any atrocity committed under its name was sublimated by definition. I chose to sign up, but you were the one who made me stay. I was a monster but I was among my own, and you were my closest in kind of all.”
It is dangerous ground, thin ice. “I didn’t realize you had such high regard for me.”
“You were intoxicating. The idea of wielding strength, of being a person who inflicts pain rather than being its target. Naturally I was no Alabaster Admiral—who was?—but serving her made me a weapon too, rather than a body that suffers under weapons.”
“I—”
The doctor rises from the chaise and returns with a plate of elongated finger-grapes, their peel an indigo so deep it’s nearly black. “I wonder,” she says, as if musing aloud, a stray thought without terminus. A grape is twisted off, pressed against Krissana’s lips. It is frigid.
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