by Liz Williams
“My apologies.”
Paravang stormed down to the carrier. When he returned, trudging up the slope, Zhu Irzh had not moved. His attention had been caught by something beneath the earth. The taste of water was suddenly fresh in his mouth, and he could hear it running, bubbling up underneath the dry stones. Zhu Irzh stood still and listened.
“Where do you think you are?” Roche snapped. “A bloody cocktail lounge?”
Zhu Irzh favored the disgruntled dowser with an uncomprehending gaze. He said, “Sorry, I was listening for something.” This was interesting. He’d always known he possessed these powers, like most demons from the first levels, but he’d never actually bothered to put them into practice before. Could such skills, Zhu Irzh wondered, be used for locating something less boring than ch’i meridians? Buried treasure, perhaps?
“Never mind!” the dowser snapped.
On further investigation, they discovered that Zhu Irzh was right. There was a big spring, gushing out of the gap between the hidden strata. Paravang’s fury that it had been the demon and not he who had discovered the spring was manifest. Moreover, he would not admit his error, subsequently acting as though Zhu Irzh had been somehow abducted into the netherworld from which he came. When forced by circumstance to utter, he spoke into the air.
By now, the sun had broken through the clouds and the suburb of Wuan Chih spread in a tarnished glitter far below. The earth of the site was covered in condensation; droplets lying like spider webs over the rumpled russet soil. Zhu Irzh turned and gazed down the slope with pleasure. He may have a few frustrations with this world, but he could not deny that it had its charms. He watched the clouds settle over the distant hills, dimly aware that Paravang, directly in his field of vision, had flung down the dowsing rod.
“What are you staring at me for?” Paravang shouted. All the dowser’s control was evaporating like the risen mist.
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you off.”
Paravang was not appeased by the apology. Before Zhu Irzh’s startled gaze, the dowser snapped. He began to rave: shouting about imported labor, filthy creatures who weren’t even foreigners but worse, something conjured up from Hell, taking his job and his money away from him, stealing his secrets, and it all got much worse. By this time a small and curious crowd had gathered. Zhu Irzh blinked. He could feel a stream of pheromonal hatred emanating from the dowser. Heat began to swim in his blood and drive a spike behind his eyes. He blinked, trying to keep a sudden, overwhelming fury at bay. It was too powerful for Zhu Irzh to reflect that this was not normal behavior for him, that it was utterly irrational …
“—who summoned you up?” Paravang shrieked. His round face was distorted with rage.
“I was not summoned,” the demon heard himself say, very softly.
“—just because you’re some spawn of Hell you think you can lord it over the rest of us, come here and take my living away—”
The crowd made a little convulsive motion forward, as if pulled by a sympathetic string. Zhu Irzh reached Paravang in three strides. He appraised the ranting dowser for a moment, then reached out, as contemptuously as a cat, and swiped Paravang in the ribs. His sharp claws cut through Paravang’s shirt like butter and sent him sprawling to the ground. Paravang looked aghast at the parallel bloody grooves in his flesh and wailed. All movement stopped. Zhu Irzh watched him with a dreadful interest. Everything became inverted, the sky darkened and the ground underneath him seemed horribly bright. Zhu Irzh reached down a clawed hand, hauled Paravang easily to his feet, and hit him again across the side of the head. He could smell the enticing scent of fresh blood. There was a series of meaningless noises away to his right, which, if he had been able to understand them, would have resolved into the voice of the site manager, shouting. He glanced down at the ground and saw that the meridian at his feet was glowing white hot, all the way down into the city. Then something hit him in the ribs and bowled him over, knocking him away from the meridian. The rage was abruptly gone, melted like snow, but in its place was a dull, burning ache in his side that kindled into blazing pain. Zhu Irzh’s vision blurred, but through the fading landscape of the site, he saw someone sprinting toward him. A woman: tall, and wiry, dressed in Paugeng security team fatigues. And in her hand she was holding a remarkably large gun.
12
The lab team did not find Robin for some hours. Her erstwhile experiment had not bothered to gag her and when she came round, she cried for help until the coughing stopped her. She tried to get out of the bonds, but they were tied too securely and the fever weakened her. She lay for a long time in a daze. Faces swam above her: Jhai, Deveth and Malian Sardai, her own mother, and always back to Mhara’s well-water blue eyes. At first she thought they were real, but soon realized that they were no more than illusion.
Eventually, George Su found her, having heard her coughing uncontrollably. He acted promptly, releasing the bonds and sending a priority call to Jhai, who had just arrived back at Paugeng. She came straight down. Robin was too ill to speak by now, running a red-hot fever and coughing until she couldn’t breathe. Tserai called the medics and got Robin into a ward. On the way, Robin was vaguely aware of Paugeng’s private troops pouring out into the atrium. It was then about nine in the evening and the light had gone. They won’t find him now, Robin thought, elation running under the fever. He’s long gone. She was too ill to worry about the consequences. The medic kept trying to bring her round, and she knew Tserai was hovering over her to find out what had happened. She tried to tell them, but could not stop coughing, and eventually she felt a sedative prick her forearm and the ward became a woolly haze.
Under the sedative, Robin dreamed. It was a small, clear dream, like a sequence of images, very finely drawn. She was standing on a hill in a hot place. A dark red sun was setting over a line of sea. Beneath the hill lay a city, walled and crowded with tall houses, each with a curling edge to the roof, and bearing a lacy fretwork of balconies. The air smelled of blood. Smoke drifted up from the buildings and drifted across the steaming air. She could see immense towers in the distance, reaching almost to the crimson sky.
Then she was inside one of the tall houses. It was warm and shadowy, a small room with a fire in the grate. The window was made of some kind of paper, with a curled catch that cast a precise shadow against the lacquered pane. She was waiting for someone. She looked down and saw a cup filled with something thick and red.
And then she was outside again. A great wall of mountain rose up before her, a remote and rosy edge of snow in the dying light of the sun. She was running, faster than she’d ever run before, leaping the boulders and sliding down a long apron of scree. The air tasted of frost, and stars filled the sky. Robin had never seen anything so bright. Before her, the spotted, doglike creature leaped and pranced clumsily. It looked at her over its shoulder and said in a harsh human voice, “Come with me—”
—and they were back in the ward. It was dim and quiet. Robin, still dreaming, followed the animal out through the door of the ward and down the stairs. Their way was illuminated by a pale, unfocused light, which grew stronger as they neared a doorway. Robin thought they must be somewhere on level eight, below the atrium but above the main labs. The beast led her into a room full of lockers, like an old-fashioned chemist’s store. It squatted by a cabinet set into the wall.
“Why don’t you open it?” it said. Now its voice had become seductive, enticing.
Why not? Robin thought. She pulled the heavy drawer and it rolled forward smoothly under its own momentum.
She found herself staring down onto a woman’s body. The corpse was covered by a sheet of stiff, slightly oiled plastic. Its face was gone. In the dream, Robin, cold with shock, pulled the sheet down and saw that the breast was marked with long, parallel rips, the flesh on either side ruffled and frayed. Below the ribcage, the abdomen had been torn away to reveal the internal organs; very neat, like an anatomical model. There was a strong, synthetic smell. Robin pulled the s
heet back up with shaking hands. The animal pushed sympathetically against her bare shins. It’s only a dream, Robin’s mind whispered to her.
“It’s me,” Deveth’s voice said, filled with malice. “Not so pretty now, am I?”
The animal was suddenly nowhere to be seen, but Deveth’s spectral face hovered over the ruined visage of the corpse for a moment, a snarling mask, before it faded. Robin could not seem to bring herself out of her trance, and as she stood in wonder and revulsion over the corpse it dawned on her that she was awake.
Robin slammed the drawer shut. The noise reverberated throughout the narrow room and there was a little click. Looking up, Robin saw the red monitor eye swivel and focus. She bolted for the door, shut it behind her and started to run through the warren of corridors. It all looked the same. She came upon a perspex-paneled door … Looking through, she saw row upon row of beds, like a dollhouse, each containing a subject attached to dripfeeds and monitors. The wan ambient light, set at constant for the duration of the experimental run, made each face look the same. Much more distinctive than personalities, histories, names: the individual neural and biochemical basis of the organism. What is it to be the same, to be different? Robin could not have cared less. She knew where she was now. She turned right at the end of the corridor and came out by the elevator, directly underneath the wards. She thought she would get her things and go, leave forever, but the exertion made her legs shake. Her skin was clammy and hot. The fever had returned, and all Robin could do was sit on the edge of the bed trying to clear her streaming vision and eventually passing into unconsciousness.
13
Zhu Irzh blinked up into the anxious face of Sergeant Ma, which hovered over him like an untethered balloon.
“Where am I?” he heard himself say, croaking feebly, but it was not Ma who answered.
“You’re in a cell,” a crisp voice said. Zhu Irzh turned his head, to see the woman in the fatigues sitting on a nearby bench. Her pale green eyes were as cold as a winter’s night, set in a thin, drawn face. Painstakingly, Zhu Irzh reconstructed what had happened and said, surprising himself, “Fair enough.”
“Seneschal, what came over you?” Ma pleaded. Painfully, Zhu Irzh hauled himself to a sitting position and leaned back against the white plastic wall of the cell. It was some kind of mobile arrest unit; he’d seen them before. The woman’s hand stirred in her lap. He could see the glint of the gun.
“Good question,” said Zhu Irzh.
“And the answer is?” The woman’s voice was as arctic as her gaze.
“I have absolutely not the faintest idea. One minute I was fine, the next—I was freaking out. I’m as amazed as you are. I had no desire whatsoever to kill Paravang Roche. He might be a pain in the ass, but if I attempted to murder everyone in a similar position, I’d have no colleagues left.”
“You’re a demon.”
“I might be a demon, madam, but I’m not a maniac. I don’t slay people at random, I’ll have you know. Killing people requires finesse, it requires style—you can’t just leap on someone and start trying to butcher them.”
“What, like you just did?”
The woman’s voice was a razor across his senses. Zhu Irzh closed his eyes, to see if that made the pounding in his head any easier to bear. It did not. He murmured, “And you would be?” He wanted to hear her say it, though he already had a fair idea what the answer would be.
“Colonel Ei. I’m in charge of security at Paugeng Mining. And Paugeng Mining owns the site on which there is one slaughtered body, and damn nearly another.”
“Is Paravang all right?” Zhu Irzh asked, not really caring, but feeling he should ask anyway.
“He’ll live. He’s clawed and shaken, but he’ll be okay. He’s had the relevant biotic shots, apparently, so you’re unlikely to have infected him with anything.” Colonel Ei stood and crossed the cell with a long, lithe stride. She leaned over the startled demon, gazing down into his face. He could smell soap on her skin, as though she’d scrubbed at it. She took the demon’s chin in her hand and gave a death’s head smile that, to Zhu Irzh’s horror, made his skin prickle.
“I’ve placed you under arrest.”
“You can’t do that. I’m an officer. I—”
“I don’t care which department you’re with. You’re on Paugeng territory now. You’re subject to our regulations.” She gestured toward someone unseen and the engine of the arrest vehicle roared into life. “I’m taking you to the nearest secure unit.”
“Wait a moment,” Ma said. “You can’t just arrest another officer, there are procedures, and—” But the woman turned and strode through the door into the driver’s cubicle, closing it behind her with menacing care. Ma exhaled a long breath and rolled an anxious eye in the demon’s direction.
“What now?”
“I think,” said Zhu Irzh, pulling what remained of his fragmented dignity about him, “we’re going to have to do what she tells us.”
14
When Robin woke, it was morning, with the warm sunlight of the port falling across the floor. She felt perfectly well. Her cough had gone and so had the fever. She got out of bed and looked through the door. She met the enquiring gaze of a nurse, typing reports at a desk.
“There you are!” the woman said inexplicably. “I’ll call Madam Tserai.”
Robin caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror on the back of the door before she went back to the bed, and wished she hadn’t. It was sallow and pinched, smudged with the remains of her fever. Her eyes were bloodshot. She looked remarkably hung over. Jhai, on the other hand, was positively glowing with health, in a simple dark green sari and slippers.
“Robin, you’re better,” she said, with a parody of concern. Then she sat down on the bed and started to laugh. There was a grim note in it that did not augur well.
Robin waited to be told what was so funny. At last she said, “What’s the matter with me?”
“Nothing. Not anymore. What was it, Robin, were you trying to be hip, or what?”
“What?”
“Whatever did you take that shit for?”
“I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I’m not following this at all.”
“Well, you don’t give yourself tuberculosis for no reason.”
Robin thought of the garbage bags rotting in the summer alleys, disease running through the city, changing, mutating …
“I’ve got tuberculosis?”
“Not exactly. We couldn’t work out what it was at first, then Saira got hold of the hallmarks. Anyway, we found some of these in your bag …” Jhai opened her hand and the flat, white culprit lay on her palm.
“What, those? They’re our headache tablets!”
Jhai looked at her narrowly.
“Light begins to dawn, Robin. This isn’t a headache pill. This is something you take to give yourself the non-fatal, no-long-term symptoms of the more romantic set of illnesses. Like TB, and like anorexia, and Shenan fever, and AIDS.”
“What!” Robin said again.
“They’re called Geneva pills, after the old conventions over chemical warfare. People take them because it’s fashionable in certain more decadent circles of society to look beautifully wasted. So you get the symptoms, for a short time, but you don’t actually have the disease. There’s no need for a cure, because you’re not really ill. You just feel and look like death, at whim, which is a prerogative of the very rich. When you get tired of it, you stop taking them.”
“But I was coughing blood and everything!”
“Yeah, they’re an effective little number. Minor hemorrhage. I begin to perceive that this was not a matter of choice, Robin, which I should have guessed because they’re also very expensive. But then, Deveth Sardai is an heiress, isn’t she, wherever she’s got to?”
A heavily ironic use of the present tense, Robin thought. The skin along her spine crawled. “Deveth didn’t give them to me. I got them from her mother. When I went to see her, I wasn’t feeling too goo—”
> “Deveth’s mother has that effect on a lot of people.”
“—and so I raided her bathroom cabinet. They were in a Paugeng bottle. I thought they were para-codeine.”
“She probably didn’t want the old man to know,” Jhai mused. She fixed Robin with a gimlet eye. “Anyway, you’re all right now. For the time being.”
Desperately, Robin explained to Jhai that the experiment’s hands had been bound, that she had not aided his escape. Her employer proved noncommittal. Eventually Robin nerved herself to ask Jhai if she would be fired.
“I’m sure we’ll work something out, Robin,” Jhai said ambivalently, and then her wrist phone hummed, mercifully distracting her attention away from Robin. Jhai read the text message scrolling on the tiny screen, and Robin saw her face tighten with displeasure.
“God, it’s going to be one of those days,” she muttered. She gave Robin a cold glance. “I’ve got to go. We’ll discuss this later.” She left. The nurse came in soon after and gave Robin a sedative; before she had time to think, she was asleep once more.
Later, awake, Robin considered facts and tried to stifle panic. She would lose her job. They had Deveth’s dead body concealed in the morgue room (and something far away within her wailed at that thought) and she was sure she had been caught on the monitor. The experiment had gone missing; a dangerous, angry demon at large in the city who had legitimate grounds for hunting her down. She was going to get out of here now.
She dressed with haste, fumbling into her clothes, and stood waiting until she heard the nurse go into the adjoining room. There were two technicians in the elevator, neither of whom she knew. Both of them ignored her. Unobtrusively, Robin made a long detour through the palms in the atrium and as soon as she was clear of the entrance bolted into the warren streets of Ghenret. She had no clear idea where to go. She could not go home, nor to her mother’s, and there was nowhere else. She wandered through the dusty back streets, feeling eyes on her spine, eyes everywhere as far as the downtown stop. By noon Robin had crossed Ghenret and the canal district, and was into Shaopeng, merging with the lunchtime crowds and losing herself in the malls and markets near the station. She stayed there all afternoon, pretending to shop and lingering in teahouses. She had gone to the bank, and drawn out as much cash as she could from the autoteller, but she did not like to use her card in case Paugeng had put a trace on it. Robin, in times of stress, operated according to an instinctive sense of survival, which so far had not failed her. She told herself this now: Remember when you stayed in that bar all night until the man at the opposite table, the one who’d tried to pick you up, had left with another woman? His date had later been found floating in the Taitai canal. Remember when you decided not to take the ferry, or walk down that dark alley, or talk to that person? All those times, she realized, had been a rehearsal for this one. She moved among the crowds, inconspicuous, at last coming out into Shaopeng as the last green light of the afternoon fell in the strip of sky above her.
