III

ETTËVY

Work. History. Sex. Justice.

Of the four pillars of Vaik society it was work that spoke to Jonathon. Justice was an abstraction for which he had no use. Sex, like food and wine, was a sensory pleasure that came easily to him. And what was history but dust and footnotes? But work; work he understood.

Unlike many of his friends he did not play at work. He didn’t sit on a board or a charity committee, didn’t attend fundraisers or openings and consider himself gainfully employed. Work contained him. Without it he would trickle away to nothing. It was this fear of dissolving that eventually got him out of bed after The Great Hall.

He remained in his quarters for some time after Laliya’s court. When the chime signalled the start of another day, he did not stir. He didn’t join the men in the dining hall or the bathhouse. Blue masjythra brought trays of food to his room at regular intervals, and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t in the shaenet with Daidd. Every time he heard footsteps on the zigzag path during labouring hours he expected Mandalay to sweep into his room and command him back to his plot. Perhaps there was even some part of him waiting for an audience with The Woman, where she would reveal what she’d meant when she said that Jonathon would judge.

When it became clear that no one was coming, he got out of bed and took down the new masjythra that had materialised on the peg. It was longer and heavier than his old one. He slipped it over his head, remaining still as the tiny metallic squares worked their cartography, heat radiating from the mesh. He took the zigzag path to the entrance and made his way to the shaenet. The fields were bare now and resting, while the trees yellowed. In the distance work assignments repaired walls and pavements. All wore the longer masjythra.

In his absence the rampaging ivy had been cut back and the holes in the wall papered over with fresh cement. He unlatched the gate, which had somehow escaped the repairs and still creaked, and stepped into the shaenet. The sharp lime and heady wood-smoke scent enveloped him. He stood at the garden’s edge and breathed it in. When he’d first seen the shaenet it was lush, overgrown. Now it wore an air of repose. Most of the plots were sparse, their shrubs pruned and bound. Dead and dying plants had been uprooted and the soil mulched. Overhead, the boughs of the ancient trees were stripping themselves bare. The sky that had barely peeked through the canopy a few weeks back now loomed large and silver. The men were raking up the fallen leaves and carting them to the mulching stations near the shed.

As Jonathon made his way to his plot, a man he knew by sight stopped his barrow and shook his hand. Word of his return carried from plot to plot. The men stood as he passed. Some hailed him from the shed. They had heard about his encounter with the isvestyii, about their fight and about Jonathon’s trial at the mysterious hands of Vaik justice. No doubt most of it was rumour and innuendo; Mandalay had said that the existence of The Great Hall was unknown to most. He accepted their display of solidarity with a slight nod.

Daidd didn’t stand, he simply handed Jonathon his scalpel. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you.”

He took the cool, sharp blade and knelt into the dirt. He fell to pulling out the weeds that had nosed through the top cover of straw, thinking how puny they were compared to Goosen’s Trial. He gently upturned norsling leaves and dry stalks to check for aphids. He carted water from the well, feeling himself solidifying with each upturned bucket. He rejoiced at the sweat on his forearms and the strain in his muscles. The inertia he’d felt since The Great Hall moved away from him, as did the space the isvestyii had occupied in his thoughts. Whatever had been between them was done. Jonathon thought of what Mandalay had said, that the isvestyii barely crossed her mind but she thought often of Sarai, Essa, Julia and their teacher. His thoughts would bend the same way, to his child, to Adalia and Ulait, and to the women the isvestyii had killed. Between him and the isvestyii there was nothing.

Towards the end of the day, when Jonathon handed his scalpel back to Daidd and the men returned their gardening tools to the shadow-board in the shed, Ulait and some of her friends entered the shaenet. Jonathon heard their chirruping talk and laughter and smiled to himself. The girls collected around the fires burning in drums outside the shed and shouted hellos to the men they knew. The men responded with slight bows. Funny, Jonathon thought, how instinctively they all did this, though no one had told them it was the required form of address.

Ulait saw Jonathon and clapped her hands in delight. She launched herself at him and threw her arms around his neck. Instinctively he caught her, clasping her in his arms, leaving her feet dangling a foot above the ground. She felt deceptively light and fragile, her heart beating wildly against his chest, her cheek warm and flushed against his. He caught a trace of lavender in herhair.

She planted a wet kiss on his cheek and then wriggled free. “I’m so happy to see you, Jonathon Bridge,” she said, brushing the hair from her face.

“And I you, Mistress.”

“I heard about what happened,” she said in a theatrical whisper, “with the isvestyii.”

Unsure what, exactly, she knew (or ought to know), Jonathon didn’t know how to respond. “You don’t need to worry about him, Mistress.”

“I know.” She smiled then flung herself at Jonathon again, pressing her head to his chest. “I was worried that you’d be hurt. Or punished for breaking your vow. But you’re okay. I can see that you’re okay.”

Touched, Jonathon tentatively stroked her hair, a darker, redder shade than was usual with the Vaik. “I’m fine, Mistress. Thank you for your concern.”

“Come to me on the half. At the Story-Keeping House.”

“The half,” Jonathon repeated dully. He didn’t know where he was in the cycle.

“It’s in nine days’ time,” she said. “Come immediately after your bath.”

“Yes, Mistress, I will.”

Drawing, crayons, Vaik myths, chatter. Parenting practice, he thought. He looked forward to it.

A week after he returned to the shaenet, Mandalay came to him at night.

He had known this moment would come, had known it since their first meeting when he made his vow of submission. Now seemed as fitting a time as any.

It was moonless and the stars dull, as if The Woman had thrown a web over the sky. Mandalay was a shadow among shadows in the thick darkness. Her gown sighed as it dropped to the floor. “Move over,” she whispered.

He threw back the blanket and shifted to the other side of the bed. She lay beside him and cradled him in her arms. He felt the soft roundness of her breasts against his chest, the warmth of her exhalation, the wiry interlock of her pubic hair with his.

“What are your thoughts?” she asked.

“I want to go home. I miss my wife. I long for my child. I think about her all the time.”

“I know.” Mandalay spoke softly and gently, as if the syllables might cut him. “But you’re not ready yet. In your heart you know you’re not ready. Your child needs you whole.”

“Whole,” Jonathon repeated. He imagined himself at work, among his colleagues at one of the long board tables and asking them: Who here is whole? What is that like, to be whole? They would think he was mad.

Mandalay unlaced her fingers from the back of his neck and scratched small circles down his chest. She explored his balls, his cleft, his triangle of hair. Her fingers drew him expertly from his thoughts. His blood began to quicken, and with his pulse came the questions he was forbidden to ask.

“Laliya is a man,” he said, into Mandalay’s lavender-scented hair.

“No.”

“Yes. At The Great Hall, the wind pressed his gown against his body. I saw his package plain as day.”

“That doesn’t make her a man.”

“It’s a pretty definitive clue.”

Mandalay folded her hand on him and squeezed. Blood bulged at the head of his penis. “This,” she said, “is this what makes you a man? If I tore it off with my teeth would you then be a woman?” He flinched at the violence of the image, an ejaculation of blood spraying the walls red.

“Is that what a woman is?” Mandalay asked. “An absence?”

“Of course not.”

She soothed his startled erection, caressing it against the threat of her bite. “Without this,” she said more softly, “would you still be a man?”

“Of sorts.”

He gave himself over to the flood and lull of her hands. “Laliya was electii when she came here,” said Mandalay. “She lived in the outer fortress for four years, then The Woman decreed that she could be one of us. Laliya was offered the surgery. She turned it down. Most electii do. Being Vaik is a state of mind.” She turned her face to Jonathon and kissed him.

He folded into her, malleable and warm. “The Woman could be wrong,” he whispered, as Mandalay’s lips glanced his earlobe, his hairline, the bony ridge where his shoulder met his neck.

“Impossible. The Woman is never wrong.”

“But she was,” he said, torn between whether to pursue it or give himself over to Mandalay’s body, “about me. She said I would judge the isvestyii. And I didn’t.”

Mandalay pulled away from him and propped herself up on her elbow, looking down at him. Her fine red hair tickled his chest. “You will, though. At some point you will. Don’t kid yourself, Jonathon Bridge. This is just a reprieve.”

He longed to know who or what The Woman was. A flesh and blood oracle? A hereditary position passed from mother to daughter? An elected office? A myth kept alive to sustain a ruling council? He couldn’t ask, and Mandalay probably wouldn’t tell him.

“It’s a good reprieve,” he said, reaching for her again. She draped her arms around his shoulders, binding him. He gave himself to her body as to a map, studying the lean course of her neck, the tight wire of her collarbones, the hollows that fit the purse of his lips. Her arms, strong harbours, were muscular and white. He traced their circle with his cheek from the taut ball of her shoulders to the fine bones of her wrists and back. The earth was present in her sweat; she tasted alluvial. The pads of her fingers smelt of herbs.

He wanted to know her, know about her. Why she had come from the Green Sea Isles to this place. Had she loved a man once? Was it disappointment that had sent her across the sea? How many children did she have? What was it to be a parent? Which, of all the saplings and trees she had tended, did she love the most? Did she really protect him, or was it all a stratagem in pursuit of the endgame, as Daidd had suggested? But to know, he had to ask these questions, and questions were forbidden.

This embargo on inquiry, he thought, as he bent his head to her breasts, was the principle that allowed The Fortress to function. It wasn’t the stockpile of weapons in the perimeter wall or the exhaustion that left the men hungry for nothing but sleep and food, but the way that the mind slid around and around the same culs-de-sac. This contraction, the falling out of the habit of curiosity, was what ensured compliance. It turned a man inward, towards himself. What he found there made The Fortress feel just.

Jonathon took Mandalay’s nipple in his mouth and sucked. She gave a small gasp of pleasure. He wondered if a baby at the breast felt the same way. He tried to picture his own child suckling at Adalia’s nipple. But he saw only himself. The image shocked him, and in his shock he let Mandalay’s nipple fall from his mouth. He stared at the cleft between her breasts, faintly luminous in the darkness. She ran her fingers through his hair. He felt their pads marching across his brain, knowing. Knowing everything.

He draped a long line of soft kisses from the nape of her neck to the pearlescent web on her stomach. He laid his cheek against the flesh left spongy by childbirth and closed his eyes, briefly. All men, he thought, were awed by this, this power women held in their bellies. Was manhood no more than a pathetic attempt to compensate for aridity? Growth. Mergers. Acquisitions. Productivity. All of them paltry imitations of birth. He laughed against Mandalay’s belly.

“What is it?”

He shook his head and continued his trail of kisses. “Nothing. Nothing you don’t already know.”

He nuzzled into her pubic hair and the ferrous smell of her. The scent engulfed him, the same way the shaenet did. He poked out his tongue and followed the protruding lips of her labia. Mandalay sighed, and opened her legs wider. He found the string of her sanitary product and drew it away from her folds with his tongue. He clamped the string between his teeth and pulled gently till the sponge emerged. He dropped it over the side of the bed and returned to Mandalay’s clitoris.

“Come,” she said. “Come here.”

He wiped his mouth and followed her instruction. She laid him flat on the bed, then put one leg over him. She eased him inside her and folded one hand around her breast; the other she placed against her clitoris, showing him how to pleasure her. She reached her arm around his neck and drew her face close to his. He was acutely aware of the rise and fall of her breath, the little moans she made, the warmth of her against him. He focused on the complex feedback loop of stimulus and pleasure between their bodies. He thought of nothing but decoding all the little signals she emitted, from the sucking in of her breath to the flutter in her fingers against his neck, refining his response until she cried out and pulled so hard on his neck that it hurt.

After a few seconds she loosened her grip. He lay there, listening to her breathing return to normal. He hoped that she would stay, spend the night with him. He wanted to feel her warm body against his, to pretend in the half-light between wakefulness and sleep that she was Adalia. That they were at home in their own bed, and there were hours to go before the accursed alarm clock rang. Hours.

But Mandalay kissed him on the forehead and rose from the bed. He felt bereft. She slipped her gown over her head and left, pausing at the door. “Goodnight, Jonathon. Sleep well.”

He heard her steps move away from him, down the zigzag ramp and off towards whatever part of The Fortress she considered her home.

On the day of the half, Jonathon tried to remember where the Story-Keeping House was located. He’d found it by accident the last time, cartwheeling on his joy that Adalia remained his and that his baby was safely cocooned in her womb. It was to the north, he was sure of that. He began to walk, feeling the crunch and crackle of the browning leaves under his feet.

None of the buildings looked familiar. Was he on the right path? Occasionally he saw other men moving between fields; some were dozing in patches of tepid sunlight. But the habit of not asking questions had become so ingrained, it didn’t occur to him to ask for directions.

Finally, after he had meandered for some time, a square building with bishop-hat windows rose in front of him. He waited to see if Ulait would materialise at the window as she had the first time. He stood, gazing upwards. But she did not appear.

The front door was open, so he walked in. Immediately he felt ill-at-ease. The building contained the tense quietness of a surprise party.

His masjythra kept him warm in the cooling air but his bare feet were cold. He sat on the stairs and cupped first one foot then the other in his hands. He considered returning to his quarters, but a niggling fear of disappointing Ulait led him up the stairs. The silence followed him, so complete he felt he disturbed the shadows in the halls. He slapped his feet down on the winding staircase and tapped his hands on the banister just for the company of sound. All of the doors he passed were closed. He tried one; it was locked.

Would he ever find the room where Ulait had explained the picture of the isvestyii to him? Was she even planning to meet him? Perhaps it was only some idle thought she’d had, just as idly discarded and replaced in the carousel of the teenage mind. He would try one more floor. Then he would return to the warmth of his bed and idle away the time thinking about his daughter.

His daughter.

Those two words thrilled him, reminded him that he was now a fundamentally different person. He was a father. A tiny human being depended on him.

He stopped.

There was an open door further along the corridor. He cocked his ear and thought he heard rustling within the room. He paused in the doorway.

If this was the same room as last time, it was radically transformed. It had been bare then, save for the murals; Ulait had strewn her paper and paints along the wooden boards. The room was now adorned with vases of flowers and plush rugs that made his feet itch with the urge to sink into them. A crimson divan—something Adalia would love—was pushed against one wall, and everywhere he turned were cushions, pillows, ottomans, great swathes of silk. Some of the murals were covered by enormous mirrors. In the far corner an elaborate four-poster bed had been erected. He reached down and collected a glossy yard of material, deep green like Mandalay’s eyes.

“Do you like the room?”

He turned towards the voice. It took him a moment to distinguish Ulait from the vast tapestry against which she was almost entirely camouflaged. When she walked towards him, her silky red robe fluttering slightly, it was as if she’d stepped from the picture and into life.

“It’s amazing. I had no idea we were celebrating.”

Ulait laughed, as if he had made a clever joke. If he had, the punchline was lost on him.

“Would you like tea?”

He wanted to ask what sort it was, but couldn’t frame this into a statement, so he just nodded. Ulait took a brass jug from a table laden with food and drink and poured the tea into a goblet. He felt stunned by the plenty laid out before him. Glossy apples competed for space with fat wedges of cheese. Golden chicken drumsticks were arrayed on platters alongside the upturned bottoms of avocadoes. Grapes, cold meats, oysters. Sauces glistening in silver jugs.

Ulait approached him, holding out the goblet ceremoniously. He forced his eyes from the feast. There was something different about her, some detail he struggled to place. She held the goblet at the stem, reached for his hand and closed his fingers around the bowl. Up close, he noticed the dusting of gold powder on her face, her hair. He remembered reading how Vaik warriors painted themselves gold before battle.

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“You’re welcome.” She clinked her glass against his and looked up at him from beneath her long, thick lashes. The gold dust had collected in them too, making the gold flecks in her green eyes stand out. She was familiar, suddenly. Jonathon smiled to himself, wondering if every girl-child he saw from now on would evoke his child. Ulait smiled back at him, the white glint of her teeth dazzling against the red gloss on her lips.

“You have a lovely smile, Mistress.”

“Thank you, Jonathon Bridge.”

He raised the goblet to his mouth and took a wary sip of tea. To his surprise it was cold and fruity. It bubbled a little on his tongue and fizzed through his nose. Was there no end to the variety of Vaik tea?

“Do you like it?”

“I do.” Jonathon took another sip, then a gulp. The drink was delicious. “I really do.”

“It’s called verrglet, and it’s reserved for special occasions. A Vaik might taste this only three or four times in her life. It’s our drink of celebration.”

“I grow it in my plot,” Jonathon said, flushing with pleasure. It had been worth it. It had all been worth it. The Vaik recognised his rebirth. Perhaps they were the only people who could. “I am honoured, Mistress, that you think me worthy of such notice.”

Ulait took a long drink from her goblet, wrinkling up her nose as the liquid bubbled. Then she bent down, put the verrglet on the floor, rose to her full height and pulled a cord on her gown. The gown slipped to the floor in a breathy rush of red. She was naked, her limbs dusted in the gold powder. She looked as if she was encased in bronze.

Shocked, Jonathon registered her as a series of images disconnected from the whole. Her breasts, small and perfectly formed. Jutting hipbones. Tight mound of pubic hair. Tanned, strong legs. Big toe knuckling into the ground. A scab on one knee.

The pieces of Ulait moved towards him and then spoke. “I have chosen you, Jonathon Bridge.”

He was frozen in shock; and still she moved towards him.

“Take off your masjythra.”

Then panic punched the shock out of him.

“I said remove your masjythra, Jonathon Bridge.”

She was standing so close she could reach out and touch him. He took a step backwards. She raised a questioning eyebrow. He took another step backwards.

“I issued you a command.”

“I can’t,” he whispered.

“What did you say?”

“I can’t,” he repeated, still moving backwards.

She began to shake, whether from fury or a sudden gust of frigid air he couldn’t tell.

“Remove your masjythra. That’s an order.”

He dropped the goblet, the liquid splashing his leg, wheeled around and ran. He ran blindly, almost throwing himself down the stairs. He saved himself more than once by flinging his arms around the banister and holding tight while his legs swung. Ulait was screaming at him to halt. If there were Vaik nearby, and there surely were, they would soon amass at the Story-Keeping House. The idea of what punishment awaited him for this, his second transgression at The Fortress, propelled him from the building and onto the forecourt.

He had no plan other than to keep running. There was so much panic and adrenaline coursing through his body that he ran fast and effortlessly. Sweat filmed his body, wisps of mist coiling from him as his core heat collided with the chill air.

Ahead of him was a rise and on the rise a dense clump of trees. He bolted for it, then launched himself into the undergrowth, burrowing on his hands and knees. His masjythra tightened, folding like a pocket over his bare balls and cock, protecting him from the thorns and rocks. Panting, he used his head as a battering ram through the faggots and vines.

Within the copse was a small clearing. He inched around to face the other way so he could see any attack party as it came storming up the hill. He peered through the undergrowth, down the hill to the buildings. He was reasonably certain that he couldn’t be seen. The hood of the masjythra crawled up and around his head, flattened itself to his ears and neck, and settled. He placed his head in his hands and rested his forehead against the carpet of leaves. The ground smelt of damp and rot and the endeavours of worms.

“Fuck,” he muttered to the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

What had just happened?

What had just happened?

Jonathon prided himself on picking up on the currents and cross-currents that other men missed. It was one of the things that made him so dangerous. But he had misread this completely. Catastrophically. You—Adalia’s voice in his head—Always you at the centre.

“Not me,” he spoke wordlessly to the damp earth. “Ulait.” His heart wrenched at the thought of her. Poor child.

But she hadn’t organised that room by herself. Jonathon lay very still, his masjythra-clad head still clasped in his hands, his nose pressed to the earth. Understanding came.

This day had been planned well in advance. Ulait had made her choice of him, and the Vaik had prepared the room, the feast, her body paint in celebration. He hadn’t just refused a Vaik command, he’d defiled one of their ceremonies. Burnt their flag.

He lay there unmoving for some time, long after he knew he had no choice but to pick his way out of the bushes, dust off the dirt and leaves, and trudge back to his quarters to face what needed to be faced.

He thought of the last time he’d had to answer for his sexual transgressions. He’d walked blithely into that, with all the arrogance of a man who’d never been held to account. It had brought him to The Fortress, and the tangled mesh of boughs and moss that hid him, for now, from the Vaik.

The Arbour Room, Glaxxon docks. Two forty-five. Ask the concierge for The Redeemer. When he asks who you are, you say “The Fox.” Tell no one.

Jonathon read the note again. Adalia’s distinctive handwriting swirled across the crisp, olive-coloured notepaper, her great loops roping him towards an assignation on the other side of the city. He passed his square, clean hand over his chin checking for stubble, then he clicked his mouse and opened his calendar. His afternoon was encased in a large rectangle between the hours of one and five. He clicked the rectangle open and groaned as he read its contents:

Goal setting for maximum efficiency: learn the latest techniques designed to hone your focus on what’s really important. Hear from the experts how to “tune out” the white noise and zero in on the issues with the biggest strategic bang for you and your organisation. Prepare to take your communication skills up a notch as you discover how to reorient the time-wasters towards the goals that work for YOU! In just four hours you will refine your approach to strategic goal setting and planning, resulting in a more disciplined, more focused team. Prepare to unleash change!

Jonathon declined the invitation without explanation. He had his own strategic bang to unleash.

It had been some time since Adalia had issued him one of her missives. He would find them slipped into his jacket pocket or taped to the underside of his briefcase. Just the sight of her notepaper was enough to give him a raging hard-on. The notes were brief and to the point: usually just an address, a time and an (often cryptic) instruction:

Wear your silver-blue trench coat, nothing else. Tell the concierge: “the swallows shall fly at midnight.” Bring duct tape.

Hours dissolved in the pleasures of Adalia’s sybarite imaginings. They’d drifted, masked and fully dressed, through a many-floored, dimly lit building; each room dedicated to the pleasures and pains of a specific historical era or event. He’d seen strapping men in jodhpurs whipping each other with riding crops. Bejewelled, dark-skinned beauties reenacting an ancient erotic text. The Woman finding the fisherman marooned on her beach and taking him back to The Fortress to feed her monstrous cunt.

Once, Adalia had instructed him to meet her at a city park that was popular with the lunchtime office crowd and mothers’ groups. He was a little disappointed at the choice of rendezvous point. Adalia arrived tripping over a long, flouncing skirt and with a wicker basket on her arm.

“Lost your way in the woods, little girl?”

“I came to deliver you this basket, then I must be on my way back to grandmother’s house.”

“Stay a few minutes with me at least.”

“We-e-ll . . . Okay, then. But you must promise to be good.” She spread a gingham blanket under the shade of a tree and merrily directed Jonathon to rest his back against the trunk. While nosing through the basket and exclaiming over its contents she unbuckled him, straddled him and settled the voluminous skirt around them both. Then, within metres of the oblivious picnickers, Adalia retrieved morsels of cherry, chocolate and cheese from the basket. She fed him with her fingers as she moved up and down on him.

Jonathon relished returning to work with the secret knowledge of Adalia on his fingers, his thighs, his chin. He enjoyed scrawling on the whiteboard, knowing that beneath his gold and pearl cufflinks were tender half-moons left by her nails. The knowledge gave him a glow of superiority. He and Adalia were not, would never be, that couple. The couple who had an obligatory post-anniversary dinner fuck. The couple whose conversation had become so threadbare that a meal out without friends to cover the silence was unthinkable.

Jonathon looked again at her message. He felt something that, if he’d bothered to analyse it in any depth, he would have recognised as relief. Since Jureece, things had been different. He was waking up at odd hours of the night, clammy with the byproduct of viscous dreams in which Adalia was outpacing him, just out of reach. He would call to her but too late; she had already been swallowed by a crowd, or an overgrown field, or a door for which he had no key. He would lie awake, his heart slowly resuming normal operations, and watch her sleeping soundly on the pillow next to him. Occasionally, she burrowed her shoulders into the bedclothes as if tunnelling deeper into unconsciousness and further from him. Sometimes when she did this, anger surged through his body. How could she not know what he had done? What he continued to do. Why was she not pulling him back from himself, filling him up? He’d started to sleep in the spare room, about which she said nothing. In fact, she’d been oddly quiet and withdrawn for the past week or so.

The hours between now and the assignation stretched ahead of him. He scrolled through his emails and responded to the most urgent. He preempted the colleagues and clients who were most likely to call him that afternoon and dealt with their issues. He made excuses to his team and indicated he would not be contactable during the afternoon. His vagueness about his whereabouts sent a ripple of anticipation through the office. It was from occasions of equal mystery that he plucked plump, ripe corporate fruit seemingly from the ether: the accounts that wended their way to him under the noses of other bidders, and the star recruits that brought their juicy insider information and contacts.

Jonathon took the jacket from the back of his chair and slipped it on. He riffled through his desk drawer and found a bottle of cologne. He splashed it on the undersides of his wrists and the pulse point on his neck. The warm, spicy scent suffused his office. He locked his computer and flicked the out-of-office messenger on. He set his phone to silent, picked up his wallet, keys and Adalia’s note, and left the office, giving Arie a conspiratorial wink as he passed him in the hall. In the basement car park, the headlights of his convertible flashed on and off as he approached. He programmed his GPS and drove out into the stream of city traffic.

Jonathon resigned himself to crawling through the choked streets as he crossed the city, waiting for the lunchtime crowd to pass by with their phones at their ears and their oversized shopping bags on their shoulders. After an hour or so the knot of traffic unwound and he entered Glaxxon; within minutes the jostle and hum of the city yielded to the gritty, close maze of the dockland suburb. The sunlight was tepid in the grey streets but still the paint peeled from the shop facades in shreds like leprosy. The people he drove past didn’t look up.

Fifty years earlier Glaxxon had been a thriving community of migrants fresh from the boats. People had come there to reexperience the epicurean specialties of the towns and villages they had left behind, buying the wares from street carts and markets that stretched from the town hall all the way to the sidings at the docks. Glaxxon had a faintly underworld glamour about it, back in the day. Respectable businessmen and city councillors were rumoured to be caught up in laundered money and unrecorded imports of exotic animals and hard liquor.

Those days were long past. Most of the shipping freight now bypassed Glaxxon and went to the harbour at The Dryans instead. The great warehouses were abandoned and given over to squatters and criminal gangs. Glaxxon was the distribution point for the powders and pills that made their way from backroom laboratories to the noses and gullets of men in tailored suits who worked in bright city offices.

But for all its signs of decay, Jonathon intuited, Glaxxon was on the cusp of a radical reinvention. He saw that within a short space of time underground clubs would spring up in its obscure laneways, the kind of clubs that were popularised by word of mouth. Dimly lit bars with gorgeous, unsmiling staff and an impossible-to-pronounce signature dish would open their discreet doors beside tiny shops of curios and collectibles. Glaxxon’s unsavoury reputation and its history of faded glamour would twin into a new cool. Jonathon had a good nose for that kind of thing. He could practically smell the money waiting to be made in the furtive streets, and he wrote a mental note to talk to Adalia about investing in a warehouse.

His GPS had difficulty locating The Arbour Room. The prim voice kept announcing “arrived” in front of what looked like an abandoned factory. Jonathon cruised up and down the street a few times, looking for a shingle or a street number, but the road was blank, anonymous. Finally he parked his car, clicked it locked and walked slowly between the factories, warehouses and blocks of flats. He took a closer look at the abandoned factory and saw that an old-fashioned fire escape ran upwards along its side. Where the stairs ended he couldn’t tell because it was obscured by a black, scalloped awning on which “The Arbour Room” announced itself in faded silver letters.

A shiver of anticipation ran through him. What was Adalia planning?

He mounted the stairs at a clip, then slowed when he felt them reverberating. At the top of the stairs was a red door, closed, with a gleaming brass knob. He reached for it, but the door opened inwardly, as if by magic.

A man’s baritone floated from the gloom. “May I help you?”

“I’m The Fox. I’m here for The Redeemer.”

“Right this way, sir.”

The door opened wider and Jonathon stepped into an anteroom lit almost entirely by candlelight. He was in a place of shabby grandeur that might once have been a gentlemen’s club. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, crammed tightly with hard-bound books, ran along one wall. Claret-coloured leather couches, deflated and frayed but still beautiful, invited one to sit down. Ashtrays were discreetly placed on the marble and timber surfaces. Jonathon expected a butler to bring him a brandy balloon and a cigar.

“The Redeemer is waiting for you, sir. Right this way.”

The concierge had the fluid, unobtrusive movements of a man who knew how to make himself invisible. Jonathon followed him up a narrow, winding staircase to what appeared to be a garret. Through the filth-encrusted window, he could just see the street below. He noted, with some annoyance, a couple of youths in hoodies idling near his car. The concierge unlocked the door and stood back to let Jonathon pass. The door closed and locked behind him.

Adalia was there, in the middle of the small room with an apex roof. An attic room, then. Behind her, intriguingly, was an ornate, heavy velvet curtain that divided the room. She was bundled up in a coat, belted at the waist. He began to salivate at the idea of what she was wearing beneath. The ambience suggested a corset. Perhaps a maid’s outfit.

She drew her finger to her lips and indicated that he be silent, then ushered him towards a straight-backed wooden chair next to her. He sat down, then reached for his wife’s waist, but she slapped his hands away. With a secretive smile she pulled a pair of handcuffs from her coat pocket. They were heavy, the real thing: not some flimsy erotic fakery purchased from the sex shop. He briefly wondered where she had sourced them as she cuffed first one wrist, then the other behind the back of the chair. The cuffs pulled at his shoulders slightly.

Wordlessly, Adalia sashayed from him to the curtain. She drew on the plaited black cord, and the plum-coloured curtain pulled back. She ran the cord slowly through her hands, revealing the scene an inch at a time. Jonathon first made out a pair of red shoes, blue jeans and hands clasped tightly in a lap. Then two women on either side, both seated, one leaning forward eagerly; the other with her arms folded, her legs crossed, and her ankle jerking up and down. Another pull on the cord, a swish of the curtain, and a fourth woman materialised.

Adalia gave one more tug then looped the cord around a hook on the wall. She joined the women, taking a seat on the far right of the group. The fronds of the curtain whispered as they settled.

Jonathon’s mouth fell open. In front of him were five women. His wife. Jureece. Clara. A woman whose face he recognised but whose name he couldn’t quite recall. (Honour? Anna?) He hadn’t seen her in years, since before he and Adalia were married. Finally, the tanned and bouncy intern whose breasts were a wonder for the ages, Yasmin. His cock sprang up against the press of his pants, demanding release. He looked in wonder at his wife, whose face was curiously blank. How had she known? How had she possibly arranged this delectable smorgasbord?

A shaft of sunlight prised its way through the grimy window, slicing the room into a triangle of sparkling dust motes. Jonathon could barely breathe for anticipation.

Adalia cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind her left ear, the distinctive gesture that preceded a discussion she expected to be difficult. “Thank you for coming, Jonathon.” Her voice was cold, impersonal. “Do you know much of the history of The Arbour Room?”

He shook his head, slowly.

“Back in its heyday, The Arbour Room was the club of choice for gentlemen of means. They’d come here after a day at work, overseeing their clerks and dealing with the harbour masters and the customs minions that stood between them and their freight. They’d come here to read the papers and mingle with other great men. Drink brandy, smoke cigars, talk about politics and terms of trade. There was a dining hall where they could take dinner unmolested by the petty concerns of women.”

His wife was using what he thought of as her “official” voice, the one she broke out for public speaking and community events involving journalists.

“Of course their dinners and their brandies and their ironed newspapers were all prepared by women.” Adalia swept her arm in front of her, sending the dust motes dancing, and looked around. “This was where they slept. This was the female servants’ quarters. There was one for the butlers and club manager, of course. Much larger, better equipped. You can see it later if you like.”

Where, Jonathon wondered, is this going?

“Care to take a guess as to how many women called this little garret home?”

Jonathon looked around. The room was probably no more than ten square metres, fifteen at most. He shrugged, making the handcuffs rattle against the wooden backing of his chair. “Three? Maybe four?”

“Twelve. Twelve women. Four beds, three to a bed. No plumbing. No heating. Crappy ventilation, as you can see. There’s a story that one night the club manager and the butlers were bribed to leave the door unlocked. While the women were asleep, totally exhausted after a hard day’s labour, a group of club members climbed the stairs, came uninvited to this room and took it in turns to rape the women. Some of them went to the police, but what chance did they have against all these respectable and powerful men? The whole thing was hushed up, though you can find traces of it in the papers. So the law let them down. The cops didn’t want to know. The doctors who treated the women called them sluts and refused them even basic pain relief when the inevitable babies made their way into the world.”

Adalia laughed—a hard, nasty laugh. Jonathon felt the first finger of panic poke into his breastbone.

“You have to understand that most of these women were either new to this country, boat-fresh, with no connections, no family. Or they were orphaned. Or women whose husbands had run off to god-knows-where, leaving them destitute. So what choice did they have but to come back here, to this squalid little room, and go on serving and feeding and wiping the shitty arses of the bastards who had violated them?” Adalia paused. “Can you imagine that, Jonathon? Can you?”

She let the question hang in the air. Five pairs of eyes looked at him.

“What is this about?” Jonathon said quietly.

Adalia appraised him with an expression he didn’t recognise. “What do you think?”

Jonathon hesitated. Some part of him wanted to believe, still believed, that Adalia had brought them all here for a delicious afternoon, and he didn’t want to make a misstep that might jeopardise that. “I don’t know.”

Adalia took a deep breath. She was gathering herself, Jonathon knew, marshalling her forces. In a steady, controlled voice, she said, “Clara, honey. Would you like to start?”

Jonathon hadn’t seen Clara since the end of her internship, but he’d thought about her often. She looked different. Thinner. Older. Her hands trembled slightly as she reached behind her chair and took the jacket that hung there. As she twisted around, her shirt collar slid, revealing the wine-stain of her birthmark.

She held the jacket out in front of her, uncertainly, as if it might assume a different form. “Do you recognise this?” She looked at the jacket rather than Jonathon.

He nodded. “Yes, it’s mine, but how . . . ?”

“The morning after the Christmas party, when I woke up, this was in the room. The Quiet Room. Along with my clothes. The ones that had been . . . taken off me.”

Jonathon drew in his breath sharply, but the air would only go so far. A metal plate seemed to have sliced into his upper ribs and lodged there. He rattled the handcuffs and rocked, outraged, in his chair. “Get these off me. Now! Adalia—what is this? This is bullshit. Get these off me right now,” he commanded.

None of the women moved. Clara continued to thrust the jacket towards him as if she expected him to take it. Jureece looked at the ground. Yasmin and the woman whose name he couldn’t remember looked frightened.

“You,” Adalia said crisply, “are not going anywhere. You are going to sit there and listen to what these women have to say.”

“The fuck I will. You lure me here under false pretences, for what? Some psycho-feminist pity party? Seriously, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Adalia? Have you lost your mind?”

“Have you?”

He grappled with the chair and the cuffs and succeeded only in toppling himself over. He landed on his side. The fleshy pad of his shoulder took most of the blow but there was still a crack as his cheek made contact with the floor. He was shocked at the pain of it. He imagined his cheekbone fracturing—cartoon-like—triggering a zigzagging faultline through his skeleton until he collapsed, a pile of bone fragments.

Tears pricked his eyes. Adalia had passed the handcuffs through a slat at the back of the chair so he couldn’t move without taking it with him. He was almost immobilised. He lay there, gasping for breath as the pain subsided only to make way for a morbid, profound embarrassment. He hadn’t felt like this since he was an adolescent at summer camp, and even as he lay there flushing red from scalp to toe, he registered the novelty of it. This unfamiliar scale was interesting to him and, he assumed, everyone else. I will tell Adalia, he thought, before the absurdity of that notion caught up to him.

He heard the scrape of her chair as she stood and the soft clack of her heels as she walked towards him. He watched her approach—She’s going to kick me. He braced himself, and closed his eyes. But she didn’t. She bent down beside him and investigated his injured cheek with her fingers. “I don’t think it’s broken. But you’re going to have a bruise.”

“Adalia, please,” he implored her softly, so the others couldn’t hear, “untie me, for god’s sake. Whatever it is you want to talk about, whatever point you’re driving at, let’s just deal with it on our own. This is nuts, this is crazy. Baby, please.”

Adalia spoke over her shoulder. “I’m going to need some help to get him upright.”

The woman whose name he couldn’t remember came towards him with Clara. The three of them manoeuvred him and the chair back up, then resumed their seats.

“The next time you throw a tantrum and end up on the floor,” said Adalia, “you’re staying there. Understood?”

He didn’t answer. A sort of numbness was stealing over him. He couldn’t believe—didn’t believe—that this was happening. He was trapped in an unusually vivid dream. Or deep under an anaesthetic for an operation he didn’t remember needing. Maybe he was dying, or already dead. He felt himself drifting away from his body and looking down on the scene from the tip of the A-framed roof. He saw a man tethered to a chair wearing an expression of glazed shock, purple blood flooding a spot on his cheek. Five women were arrayed before him; one of them his wife. A silk-lined, tailored grey jacket heralded the women like a standard. They rode chairs like horses into battle. Words floated towards the ceiling and seemed to echo there. It was only on the rebound that he caught them.

“When I woke up I didn’t know where I was. I was in a room I didn’t recognise. It was dark but oddly luminous, too. I could hear this swish-swishing noise and a low hum, like from a fan or something. I lay there very still trying to work it out. I heard a splash and that’s when it came to me. I was in The Quiet Room at work and the noises I could hear were the fish swimming about in the aquarium. I felt this rush of relief.” Clara’s words stopped collecting at the roofline, replaced by a shrill peal of laughter. Below him, the other four women flinched in shock at the sound. “Sorry. I know it’s not funny, yet somehow it is funny. That I felt relief at realising where I was. That’s the last time I remember feeling happy. The last time I remember feeling safe.

“I just lay there, putting the pieces of the night together in my mind. I remember going about with Jureece with the Christmas decorations and making the punch. I remember talking to you and Arie and a bunch of other people from work. I remember drinking lots of punch and doing some coke in one of the boardrooms. Then everything gets really hazy. I remember being led down a corridor at one point. Jureece told me later that was you and her leading me towards The Quiet Room. I know I vomited.

“Then I remember lying down in the glow from the aquarium and going to sleep. Or passing out. But I woke up a few times.” She paused. “I saw you. And Jureece.”

Jureece stopped jiggling her ankle up and down and became very still, her eyes on the floor.

“I don’t remember you leaving The Quiet Room. I must’ve gone back to sleep. When I woke up there was someone sort of scrabbling on top of me, pulling at my clothes. I thought it must be Jureece trying to get my coat on and get me out and into a cab to go home. I remember saying, ‘Don’t worry about my coat. I’ll be fine.’ But it didn’t seem to make much difference because the person kept tugging at me, so I kept saying about the coat but then I realised they were pulling at my trousers and they were pulling them downwards and I remember thinking that was really odd because you don’t put your coat around your legs and then my legs were sort of pushed up against my chest and I was trying to get off the couch but there was someone above me blocking my way and then the next thing I knew I became aware that the person was, was fucking me and I remember thinking, There must be some mistake, and that I was confused because I was so drunk and thought the sounds were coming from Jureece and Jonathon who were fucking again on the floor so I thought, I’ll leave the room, but then I couldn’t because there was this person on me and it was me being fucked and the grunting was coming from this shadow above me and it was him that was in me and I didn’t want it but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t get my thoughts together and I kept screwing up my eyes tight then springing them open like I could throw myself out of a dream but it didn’t make any difference and then I must’ve passed out again and when I woke up the fish were splashing around and my trousers and my underwear were on the floor and there was this raw feeling between my legs and I felt flattened out somehow like I’d been run over and it took me a long time to dress myself and when I was gathering up my clothes I found this jacket bundled up with them and it’s your jacket and I know it’s your jacket because you used to leave it behind your chair and I always admired it because of the blue and gold swirls on the lining, and so I’m asking you if it was you.

“Did you rape me?”

It seemed to Jonathon that it took ages for all these words to make their way to the ceiling and assemble themselves into the right order. His wife was weeping, quietly. She had her hand around her mouth as if she feared what might come out and the tears were spooling from her eyes, down her cheeks and over her hand, dripping onto her coat. The sight of his wife in such distress, and his laboured comprehension of the question that was being asked of him, tore him from the roof. He crashed into his body and felt the swelling along his left cheekbone and the burning in his shoulderblades from the pull of the handcuffs.

“No,” he said; and his voice was clear and strong.

Clara dropped the jacket to the floor as if its weight was too much for her. Her eyes welled with tears. “I went to the hospital and they did a rape kit. Do you know what a rape kit is?”

“No, Clara. I don’t.”

“It’s this cardboard box no bigger than this,” she mimicked its shoebox shape with her shaking hands, “and it has lots of plastic envelopes in it with different swabs. They comb through your pubic hair and extract material that’s not yours—and that’s what they call it: ‘material’—and that material goes in one of the envelopes. Then they do a swab around your vagina. Then you have to lie back and they open you up with a speculum and poke around inside you looking for somebody else’s DNA, and the whole time you just want to run out of the room and get into a shower as hot as you can stand it and scrub at your skin because you think that you will never, ever feel clean again.”

“Clara,” he said softly, “I’m so very sorry.”

“So you admit you did it?”

“No. It wasn’t me. I would never, ever do something like that.” One of the women made a scornful noise.

Jonathon ignored it and continued. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry that I didn’t stay with you after—” He stopped. Was he going to admit to his infidelity while his wife was sitting right there? He felt assaulted by crosswinds of confession and rebuttal, guilt and innocence.

He looked at the young woman in front of him, so changed from the perky girl who had stencilled snowflakes on the glass doors of the offices. She kept her eyes on him, her mouth a thin line of pain. Her hands shook in her lap.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t stay with you after I’d . . . after I’d been intimate with Jureece.” Jonathon did not look at his wife. Could not look at his wife. “I put my jacket on you to keep you warm. For what it’s worth I felt terrible about what happened. I feel terrible about what happened.”

“You feel terrible,” said Clara flatly. “Did you offer to make a statement to the police?”

“No, but no one asked me to. If I’d been asked I absolutely would have.”

“Did you instigate an internal inquiry? You’ve got the power to do that. I know you have.”

“No, but—”

“Did you go to HR with your concerns? Did you raise them in a meeting, tell your colleagues and your fellow executives that what happened to me is unacceptable and there needs to be changes?”

“No, but you can’t go randomly accusing people or upturning an entire organisation because of one”—he was about to say “unfortunate,” but stopped himself—“because of one horrible incident.”

“It’s called rape, Jonathon.” It was his wife who spoke. He turned to look at her. She didn’t seem angry, just sad. Unbearably, inconsolably sad.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, it is.” He turned his eyes back to Clara. “What happened to you is unforgivable, Clara. For what it’s worth . . . for what it’s worth, it did change things. For me, I mean. I’ve been looking at everyone at work with suspicion, wondering, Was it you? So I don’t blame you for wanting to know if it was me. I’m happy to take a DNA test so you know I’m telling you the truth. I will help you. I’ll do whatever you need me to do. If you want to press charges I will support you.” He meant it, and he felt good that he meant it.

“Why didn’t you quit?”

“What do you mean?”

“If it affected you so much and you didn’t know who to trust at work anymore, why didn’t you quit? Why didn’t you storm out of there in disgust? Find a new job? Go to the media? Raise a fuss?”

Jonathon thought about that.

The woman whose name he couldn’t remember answered for him. “It’s because it’s all the same, isn’t it? You leave one firm, you go to another, but it’s all the same. Same culture. Same expectations. Same bullshit. Different poodles, though—that would have to be a plus.”

He started at the word “poodles.”

“What? You thought we didn’t know that’s what you call us? Cute and decorative and great fun at the Christmas parties, after which you move us on and get a fresh, unsullied batch. Isn’t that right?”

“What does any of this have to do with you?”

“Do you remember me?”

“Yes.” Oh god, what was her name?

“We were graduates together. Actually, we were the star recruits that year, the ones who all the top firms wanted. I remember thinking, This is it. I’ve made it. All that hard work andnow . . . now I’ve arrived.” She smiled wistfully. “And now here we are—you’re one of the masters of the universe and I’m . . . I’m doing okay. Well, even. But I pay the vagina tax. And you don’t.”

“I’ve worked fucking hard for everything I’ve achieved. Everything. It wasn’t just dropped into my lap through sheer force of my magnetic penis, so—”

She waved his words away as if they were an irritant. “You’re smart, you’re motivated. You work hard. All true. But you know what? Those things are true of everyone in this room. It’s a slow and painful process, learning that you’ll never be quite good enough. You’ll never have the goods, or rather, you’re a different type of goods. One that gets served up for men like you.”

“That is such bullshit. I’ve never forced myself on a woman in my life. I find the idea repugnant. I’ve promoted women. I respect women. Jureece,” he turned from Anna/​Honour to Jureece, “you and I know what happened between us.” He wouldn’t look at his wife. Jureece continued to look at the floor. “Can you look at me, please?” She dragged her eyes from the floor to him, reluctantly. “Did I force you to have sex with me?”

She shook her head.

“Did I threaten you in any way? Use a knife or drug you or tell you that if you didn’t have sex with me then there’d be no job for you?”

She shook her head again.

“I’m a shitty husband,” he said, and his tone had the ring of a man used to having the floor. To being listened to in meetings and having his ideas attributed to him and no one else. “I’ve been unfaithful to Adalia. But I’ve never, EVER had sex with a woman without her consent.”

“What do you know about consent?” Adalia spat the words at him. She appeared to him suddenly accipitrine, primed and ravenous. “A girl comes into a firm like yours after years of study and slog. She’s special. Different. She’s one of the chosen ones. Her friends know it and they resent her a little. Her parents are bursting with pride. She’s become a person apart, alienated from where she came from, not quite sure-footed in this new world she finds herself in. So when she finds out what’s expected, what’s required, how much choice do you think she has, Jonathon?” Adalia raised her hand to stop him speaking. “And don’t tell me that she can say no. She can say no to you, maybe. But what about the next one? And the one after that? How do you say no to a whole culture? A whole history?”

“That. Is. Such. Bullshit. You want me to carry the can for every shitty thing every man has ever done?”

Yasmin spoke softly, almost inaudibly. “I didn’t want to have sex with you.”

Jonathon flinched, remembering her naked from the waist up in the photocopy room. How her tanned, unblemished skin and impossibly round, inviting breasts had seemed so bountiful. He’d gone to the photocopy room because he was retracing his steps, trying to find a file that he’d misplaced. He found Yasmin instead—petite, golden and compliant. He’d unwrapped her like a rare and precious object, assuming all the while that she was aware of the worship he brought to her body.

“I have a boyfriend. We’re faithful to each other. Well, we were. You just . . . You just.” Her voice tapered off and she seemed suddenly childlike, lost. “You didn’t give me space to say no to you in a way that wouldn’t do either of us any damage.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were so sure of yourself, so confident. Like it didn’t even occur to you that I might not want to. As if such a thing was impossible, like, like . . . like water flowing upwards or the sun staying up for three days. And that made me worried that you’d get angry if I said no and then you might freeze me out and all of it would have been for nothing. So I tried to, you know, laugh about it when you kissed me, and I picked up my file and made busy noises but it was like you didn’t register that, and then I just sort of . . . froze.”

Jonathon tried to remember their encounter, any noises she’d made or words she’d spoken. But all he could recall were those glorious, glorious tits and the colour of her, so even, like she’d been dipped in toffee.

“So now I just, I avoid you. I try not to think about it. Some days I’m mad with myself for not slapping you and storming out of there. Other days I just feel tired, like I’m in a fight that’s too big for me and it makes me exhausted just thinking about it. My boyfriend broke up with me, by the way. When I told him. About what happened. He called me a slut.” She couldn’t quite get this last word out, so all Jonathon heard was “slu” before her whisper faded.

He could think of nothing to say. Literally nothing. He was a man adept at silences. He could drop them in meetings, let them fatten and grow portentous. He could do warm silence and icy silence, and a silence that was neither and discomfited people with its ambiguity. But this—this blankness, this absence—was new.

Again, he thought how he would like to tell this to Adalia, and that’s when it hit him: he would be telling Adalia nothing anymore. Adalia was leaving him. Their marriage was over. The shock of this realisation made him momentarily forget where he was. He tried to lean forward and put his head in his hands before he remembered that he was handcuffed to a chair and could go nowhere until someone unlocked him.

So deep was his torpor that he barely noticed the women preparing to leave. There was a shuffle for coats and the silent, prolonged embraces of people who’ve been through something together that they will never speak of again. The door opened and closed a few times, and then there was just him and Adalia in the room, his jacket crumpled on the floor between them.

Adalia cleared her throat. “I’ve arranged for your clothes and toiletries and papers you might need to go to your parents. I’ll have the rest of your stuff boxed up. Let me know where you want me to send it. Or I can put it in storage. We can sort out the property and money issues later. Just so you know, I don’t plan any funny business: fifty-fifty like we always agreed.”

“I was never unfaithful in my heart, Adalia. I’ve never loved anyone else.”

She was quiet for a few moments, mashing her knuckles into her mouth and trying not to cry. Her words, when they came, were cracked and hollow. “It’s not the infidelity, Jonathon. You can get over that. You can even maybe accommodate that. But what you’re capable of. What you can ignore.” She shook her head. “I don’t know who you are.”

Me neither, he thought miserably.

“There’s one other thing.” She stood up from the chair and unbuckled her coat. She dropped it onto the chair and took a step towards him, flattening the fabric of her dress around her chest and stomach. Her belly was taut and hard, her breasts fuller than usual. She let this new fact drop into the heaving wash of Jonathon’s brain, then retrieved her coat. “The concierge will be up in about ten minutes to remove the cuffs. Don’t contact me, and don’t come to the apartment. I’ve had the locks changed.”

Her heels echoed along the corridor, away from him. Of all the things he could have thought in that moment, he remembered his former colleague’s name. Anya. Her name was Anya.

Jonathon thought about all of this as he lay in his burrow of sticks and leaves. His masjythra was cinched around him, buttoning down against the autumn chill. He couldn’t stay there, and there was nowhere he could run. He crawled out on his hands and knees. He pierced the side of his face on a thorn as he emerged. It was a deep cut; the blood ran warm along his face. He stood up in front of his hide-out and brushed the leaves and dirt from his arms and legs, then he swabbed at his face with his hand.

He trudged down the hill towards his quarters, expecting at every moment to be apprehended by a party of Vaik or red masjythra sent to cuff him. But the grounds were empty. A presentiment crept over him that everyone was gone. Some catastrophe had unfolded in his absence and he had shuffled out of the copse to find himself the last man alive at The Fortress. He pushed the thought away from himself and picked up his pace. Even when the quarters and the bathhouse came into view he saw no one, and the only antidote to the silence was his footfall on the darkening grass.

Relief flooded him as he entered the quarters and began to climb the ramp. Although it was quiet, it was a habituated quiet. There were others nearby, breathing, thinking. Yet no one had come to apprehend him. Why?

He entered his room and saw Mandalay sitting on the bed. Straight-backed and rigid, she was carved sharply in profile against the stone. He took up a position opposite her, his back to the wall. Her gaze moved deliberately from their abeyance in the middle distance, along his torso to his face. Her eyes were aflame with rage. The gold flecks in her irises had the glow of molten metal.

“You,” she said acidly. “How dare you? How dare you?”

“She’s a child,” he said. “A child, Mandalay.”

“She’s Vaik. And she’s been raised to believe that pleasure is her birthright. This was a big day for Ulait, for all of her mothers. And I approved her choice.” Mandalay shook her head. “Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible?”

Jonathon was dumbstruck.

Mandalay laughed—a hard, nasty laugh. “I was vetting you. For some reason Ulait likes you. I wanted to be sure you would bring her pleasure. To make her first time something she would look back on with pride and satisfaction. Not the furtive, awkward first fuck most girls out there”—she gestured at the window, towards The Dryans—“have to endure and spend the next ten years getting over before they figure out how their bodies work. Ulait chose the food. We spent two days cooking. She poured the verrglet into the decanters herself. We all helped with preparing the room, her make-up. You are despicable.”

He wanted to know if Ulait was all right, but he knew he daren’t ask a question. Mandalay was shaking slightly, from rage.

“I accept the punishment, Mandalay.”

She rose from the bed, erect and intentful, and stretched her hand towards him. With the hard, filed fingernail of her thumb she slowly sliced open the cut on his face that had closed in the gelid wind. He winced, then felt the weep of blood along his skin. She placed her palms on either side of his head and drew towards him, so close he felt her breath on his face.

“It’s not for you to accept anything. You have no say here. You neither accept nor refuse. You are emptied out, ego-less. But you are such a giant to yourself that you don’t know how to give yourself away. The only eyes you have are your own, so you’re sightless.”

He shrunk into the wall behind him. Was he to be taken to The Great Hall again? Would he be brought before The Woman? Part of him didn’t care. He’d done the right thing, and that was all.

Mandalay pushed off from the wall beside his head and clapped her hands, loudly, in front of his face, making him start. “I wash my hands of you, Jonathon Bridge. I relinquish you from my assignment.” She lowered her voice. “If Ulait is scarred by this, I’ll kill you myself.” With that she turned on her heel, strode to the doorless door and clicked her fingers. “The reds will come for you now.”

Then she was gone.

The red masjythra entered his room and wordlessly took him by the arms. They led him down the zigzagging ramp and towards the bathhouse. He was expecting to be taken to The Great Hall, but they came to a halt at a low stone building adjacent to the bathhouse. The building was small and compact, no larger than his room. He had always assumed it was a storehouse.

One of the men held the door open and Jonathon was marched inside. The room was vacant and airless, its only contents a desk and an intercom. It took him a moment to notice the dark rectangle sliced into the floor and the stairs winding down beneath it. He was sandwiched between the reds—one in front of him, one behind—and escorted underground.

The air in the stairwell was close and damp. The hood of his masjythra snaked upwards and tightened around his head, chin and cheeks, leaving only a thin sliver for his eyes. The walls were carved from the earth and marbled like cake. Had he been marched down those stairs when he’d first come to The Fortress, his legs would have trembled and buckled from the unfamiliar exercise. Now, standing in front of a square, barred cell—as a red punched a code into a keypad, making the door glide silently open—they shook from fear, not fatigue.

“How long will I be here?”

The men didn’t answer. One jimmied his fist into the small of Jonathon’s back until he shuffled into the cell.

“Wait. Just wait.” His mind raced. A lawyer. Could he speak to his lawyer? Get a message to her somehow?

One of the men punched in another code, and the door whispered shut. The men did not make eye contact with Jonathon. Silently, they disappeared back up the stairs and into the world on the surface.

“Wait,” Jonathon shouted after them. “Wait, please. You need to tell someone I’m here. People need to know I’m here. My wife needs to— Come back!”

This wasn’t happening. They couldn’t just lock him up and walk away.

“Come back,” he demanded. He gripped the bars and screamed, “Get the fuck back here RIGHT NOW or I won’t be answerable for the consequences. I’ll have this place shut down.”

He yelled his threats and demands until he grew hoarse.

This simply wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.

And yet it was.

These contrary facts from opposing universes collided and brought on a kind of fit. His whole body shook under the pressure of it. The fine muscles under his eyes bunched and shivered, and his teeth chattered. He bit his tongue and blood, warm and salty, filled his mouth. Electricity crackled through his hair. He gulped at the fetid air, but it dissolved before the withering branches of his lungs. His rapid-fire heart discharged into its chambers.

The ground rushed towards him.

He opened his eyes and took in the slantwise cell. He had landed on the same cheekbone he’d cracked at The Arbour Room and it was throbbing against the stone floor. Luckily, his masjythra had protected him from further injury. He pushed himself to a sitting position and nursed his cheek in his hands.

The cell was devoid of natural light, but a dull orange flickering along the walls told him a fire burnt in a drum nearby. Directly opposite him was another cell, empty.

“Is there anyone there?” he asked the darkness, his voice raspy. “Is anyone else held here?”

His voice didn’t echo, so the underground chamber was large. He’d heard stories of vast subterranean networks at The Fortress. They’d been built, the stories went, during the time of the civil wars, before his city and the Vaik agreed they could live, segregated, with one another. The tunnels had served as supply routes and escape hatches.

Jonathon willed himself to his feet and walked unsteadily to his bunk. The walls were bare earth, perfunctorily sealed. The floor was roughly paved. There was a drinking fountain built into the back wall and next to it a hatch—for food, he surmised. A clean, chemical toilet was built into the corner furthest from the bed. The mattress was clean and firm, the quilt freshly laundered. So even here, he thought darkly, a Vaik might want to fuck him.

He vacillated between fury and torpor.

Periodically, outrage would flood him and he’d stand railing at the door, demanding release. He indulged long and complicated fantasies whereby Mandalay got her comeuppance. He knew people. If only she knew how he knew people. He would have Adalia write an exposé; engage the best lawyer; take Ted—his MP—to dinner and tell him of the gross violations taking place not ten kilometres from where men made laws. He’d have The Fortress stormed, torn down beam by beam. He’d see Mandalay in the dock if it killed him.

The fury sustained him for a time, then it ebbed, and he was left frozen by the reality of his incarceration. At such times he couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk. Could barely think. In his somnolence, the curtain between sleep and wakefulness drew aside until he was no longer sure of the difference between them. In his dreams he was awake, but lying on the mattress in this very cell. When he was awake he would remember nights spent in other beds—the hard, narrow bunks at Lake Wykaita and the scuffle of boys returning from or venturing towards night raids. Adalia’s bed in her old apartment, fluttering with silver chocolate wrappers. His bed at his parents’ house, the one he’d returned to—dumbfounded—when Adalia left him.

Time was the binding of his life. He had accreted milestones like a hoarder. School, university, first job, post-graduate studies, promotion, promotion, executive, marriage, partner. Even his year in The Fortress as a supplicant had been roped off by temporal buoys: fifty-two weeks, at which point he would emerge as a husband and father and assume his trajectory. He had a horror of timelessness, those marshy spaces between deadlines. He must always be attaining the next goal or he felt himself dematerialising, a science-fiction character stuck in a malfunctioning teleporter.

In his tiny cell, time ceased to be linear and became at times circular, at others stuck fast. Food would appear at odd times in the hatch. But who brought this food? Why did he never see anyone? The dishes would gather and he would decorate the floor with them, arranging the smaller and larger plates in a model of the solar system. Then, suddenly, the plates would be gone and he would wonder: were they ever there?

He tried to pin time fast by visualising where his urine came up to in the chemical toilet. If it emptied then he would have a sign—proof—that change was going on around him. That people came in and out of his cell and he hadn’t fallen into a cosmic anomaly. But even as he stared at the bowl, denying the urge to urinate, he was never sure if this was the first time he was about to urinate; that those previous times were figments or rehearsals for this moment.

His mind slipped sideways. Coronas burst in his cell and rearranged the marbled slices of earth into swirling kaleidoscopes. Ulait would tell him stories about what the shifting patterns in the soil meant.

Sometimes his father sat on the edge of his bed, as ill at ease as he had been when Jonathon returned to his parents’ home after Adalia left him. “Well, well,” his father would say, as if preparing for a conversation that never came. Whenever he found himself alone in a room with Jonathon, he left hurriedly, summoned by an urgent task that could brook no delay.

Jonathon had long conversations with his mother in which he told her just how much he had hated summer camp. When she shrugged or made to contradict him, he’d reach out to shake her to attention, and she would glitter and disintegrate and reform in another space in the cell.

Mandalay would come sometimes, slicing open the cut on his face again. Her words ricocheted off the cell walls: Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible?

The words poured through the bars of his cell like water, rushing at him. They seeped out of the clay, and then out of his pores. Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible? The sentence multiplied and played on different frequencies at once, until he was bombarded. It was a mocking whisper at his water fountain and a scream beneath his bed. When he clutched the bars so tightly that his knuckles whitened it was a chill, slow verdict incanted by a universal council. At night when the reflection from the fire in the drum was strongest, it was a children’s singsong chorus.

At one point he fell asleep (or woke up) to find three girls sitting on his bed. They surveyed him politely. He shrunk into the bedclothes till only his eyes and forehead poked out. All of the people who had drifted in and out of his cell during his incarceration were known to him. He did not recognise these girls. Who were they? What did they want with him?

They would appear and disappear at odd intervals. When they were absent he would look for them, inexplicably worried for their welfare. When they appeared he would hide under the bedclothes waiting for them to be gone. They mostly perched on his bed. They were straight-backed and fresh-scrubbed, their hair swept into neat ponytails. They had the air of well-bred school students waiting for class to begin. On some level he knew that it was up to him to initiate an exchange with them, but his mind was blank, then it slid into panic.

Always the cell played its multi-track soundtrack.

Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible?

Do you think (Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible?) I came to your bed because I find (Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible?) you irresistible?

Only Adalia never came to his cell, and he understood by this that she still did not know who he was. He called out to her, or thought he did, but he was too indistinct for her to locate.

They were there again, the girls. Two sat cross-legged; one dangled her legs by the side of his bed. She was strong, athletic. Good health radiated from her. Perhaps he could ask her to help him escape. But he stayed where he was, the blanket covering most of his face, staring surreptitiously at them. He’d never heard them speak, though they always seemed poised on the brink of it.

He longed for words, for anything other than the snaking chorus in his cell. He opened his mouth to speak but the language escaped him. How did speech happen? Of what did it consist?

I’m losing my mind.

At first, this realisation didn’t cause him a great deal of pain. He viewed it dispassionately, the way he viewed profit-and-loss statements. He moved inexorably from the numbers to redundancies and restructures without sentimentality. When the facts spoke, they must be answered.

But then he understood that if he was insane, his child was lost to him. The Vaik would hand him over to Adalia (assuming they ever planned on letting him go) and she would take the steps to have him dealt with “appropriately.” He didn’t doubt she would do this. Their baby came before either of them, a hierarchy of importance that he fully endorsed.

Something in him stirred. Some flicker of the boy who knew he didn’t want to go to Lake Wykaita. The man who couldn’t quite let go of whatever had happened to Clara in The Quiet Room. The father.

Slowly, he drew back the bedsheet until his face was visible. What must he look like? Cachexic and hairy like a starving madman lost in the wilderness.

The girls looked at him. Polite. Expectant.

“Hello,” he croaked.

They smiled at him, showing white, even teeth.

When the reds came to lead him out of the cell, he paid them only cursory attention. It wasn’t until he stood outside, blinking in the feeble light with the wind raising goosebumps on his legs, that he began to suspect he was no longer in his cell. The reds wandered a few metres distant and politely looked away.

He dug his toes into the lush grass. There must have been rain in his absence, lots of rain. The grounds were a vast green canopy. After being enclosed with only the swirling browns and irons of earth colours, he found the emerald was almost painful to the eye. Tall reeds were licking at the side of the bathhouse and the low, tinny whoosh of water running through pipes echoed around him.

He kicked first one leg then the other in front of him. He jumped, tentatively at first, feeling the impact spread across his knees and feet. Then with real gusto, as high as he could. His body felt different. Slacker. Weaker.

How long had he been underground? Why had he been released?

The air, pure and fresh after the miasma he’d been breathing, bleached his lungs. His stay underground had refined his senses. Chlorophyll, sea salt, soil litter, wet bark—he detected them all on the rushing breeze. He dropped to all fours and curled like a cat, arching and flattening his back. His muscles twitched at the unfamiliar motion and his masjythra snaked around him.

He lay on his stomach, then rolled over, surveying the sky. Clouds rushed past so fast he thought they couldn’t possibly be real and his mind was playing tricks on him again. But then the clouds opened and the rain fell, making his masjythra coil tighter around him. He stuck his tongue out and felt the raindrops splash into his mouth, and the certainty grew within him that he was outside and he was free.

The reds hovered nearby. Jonathon turned his face to the side and observed. A couple of them were conversing intently, their voices too low for him to decipher their words. They were clearly waiting to take him somewhere, some assignation. So why were they permitting him this indulgence? He turned his face to the sky again and pushed back his masjythra so he could feel the cool, clear water on his skin.

One of the reds tentatively approached him. “Jonathon Bridge. We’ve orders to take you to your assigned Vaik.”

He didn’t say anything, just lay there as the rain fell.

The red looked at the others, seeking assistance. “She’s waiting,” he said.

“Let her wait.”

He enjoyed their collective intake of breath at his insolence and spread his arms wide across the grass, as if settling in.

“If you don’t come voluntarily we’ll have to carry you.”

“Carry away.”

He made himself a dead weight as they lifted him by the wrists and ankles, his bum sagging towards the grass. Grunting, they manoeuvred him along.

“That ramp is going to be fun,” he said; then, as they all locked eyes at the thought of how to leverage him up the zigzag ramp, he began to laugh. The whole thing was suddenly, unbearably funny. Once he started laughing he couldn’t stop. His body shook with it. The reds grappled with him as with a slippery fish. One lost his grip on Jonathon’s wet ankle and his leg fell to the grass, making him laugh even more uncontrollably.

“You fucker,” a red swore under his breath.

Jonathon raised his hand and kept it up while he struggled to surmount his hysterics. “Just—give—me—a—minute.”

They dropped their hands from his limbs and stood back as he laughed himself out.

“Whoo.” He breathed slowly and purposefully, gathering himself together. “Okay.” He got to his knees, paused, then stood up. His abdominal muscles ached from laughing, and tears leaked from his eyes. He fought down one last wave of hysteria, then indicated that the reds should proceed.

He wanted to see Mandalay after all.

Mandalay was waiting for him in his quarters. She stood at his window, her eyes sliding from him to the horizon, her fingers thrumming against the stone sill. He looked around his room as if seeing it for the first time. It was larger than he remembered, the bed more luxurious, the floors and walls cleaner and brighter. He checked for strange hairs on his pillow, for dust accumulating in the corners—something to fix how long he’d been gone.

Mandalay gave him a single, searching look then turned again to the window. “You are all right,” she said.

He was riled by the assertion, was ready to give her both barrels, but she spoke again.

“Ulait has disappeared.” She spoke to the perimeter wall, the sky, the air. “No one has seen her for two days.”

Mandalay stayed like that, peering out the window, while he tried to comprehend the import of her words. He remained on the precipice of delirium and could easily fall into it. He would enjoy Mandalay’s fury at his insensibility, his refusal to be reached.

But.

Ulait. Gone.

He commanded his thoughts to come to order. “She’s a teenager. She’s probably playing hooky with one of her friends, listening to music and—” He was going to say “talking about boys,” but stopped himself. “And drinking verrglet.” He was startled by the sound of his own voice. Was he always so loud?

Mandalay’s fingers fluttered from the windowsill to a pendant at her throat. She ran the pendant back and forth along its silver chain. “When we were approaching The Great Hall there were two olöcks foraging in the undergrowth. Do you remember?”

Jonathon wondered what this could possibly have to do with Ulait. Now that he’d pushed back his hysterics he found he needed to sit down, to get his head together and embed himself once again in the ebb and flow of time at The Fortress. To feel normal. Once he’d achieved that he’d understand better what to do about Ulait.

“The olöcks are usually ground dwellers. They make their nests in the hollows in the downs. They feed on worms and bugs they find in the undergrowth. They don’t have natural predators here, so they’ve fallen out of the habit of flying. But earlier this week, there were two reports of olöcks flying. The general consensus is that they’re checking the air pressure. They’re remarkably sensitive to changes in the weather. The olöcks disappeared two days ago. It all points to one thing: a sestyatesh.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to think very carefully about your response.”

“All right.”

“Did Ulait ever confide in you, mention a special place or a hideaway?”

He saw that it cut Mandalay; the idea that Jonathon, an outsider, might have a connection with Ulait from which Mandalay was excluded. He was pleased. He hated her. (You frightened me.)

“No. I think you’ve overestimated our intimacy. Look, Mandalay, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to sit down.” He dropped onto the bed. He felt not faint exactly, but as if the floor was unsteady and might give way beneath him.

“You’ve had weeks to do nothing but sleep,” she snapped. “I command your attention. In the Story-Keeping House, what did you talk about?”

“Fuck off.” (You frightened me.)

Mandalay seemed to be struggling to retain her composure. He wondered if this was the first time he’d seen her authentic self. The self she inhabited when she wasn’t playing chess with men like him. She took several deep breaths before she spoke. “You feel hard done by. Very well. That is a discussion for another time. Please understand. Ulait is missing and we are on the verge of a terrible storm. If you know anything that might help us locate her—”

Beg, bitch, he thought. (You frightened me.)

“It would be helpful if you shared what you and Ulait talked about in the Story-Keeping House. The information might seem innocuous or unimportant to you, but it might give us a clue.”

“Mostly we talked about how she wanted to create her own drawings, use her own imagination without having to rehash stale Vaik myths all the time.”

Mandalay’s eyes darkened, and Jonathon rejoiced to find he’d provoked her.

“She asked me to draw a picture.” He smiled at the recollection of Ulait’s expert mimicry and her encouragement of his inept scrawling. “I was rubbish.”

“And when you broke your vow and humiliated Ulait—she didn’t make any threat to run away?”

“When I refused to be a paedophile, no. No, she didn’t make any threat.”

Mandalay and Jonathon looked narrowly at each other across the room. He’d been marched to The Great Hall for arguing with a man declared isvestyii for raping children; then marched underground for refusing to have sex with a child. He remembered the way Mandalay had sliced his face open with her nail. The sardonic smile playing about his lips spoke plainly: Go fuck yourself. The old, familiar pleasure in skirmish returned. It was a warm, piquant bloom in his belly, the same bloom as after the first glass of good red wine.

“She might have mentioned something, but I’m half-starved and exhausted.” He feigned yawning. “It’s hard to remember.”

“I can have a tray sent up if you like.”

“And I’m cold.”

The words came strangled out of her throat. “I will arrange a warm bath.”

He felt the silken slipknots of power between them disentangling.

“I’ll have some food prepared for you.” Mandalay strode towards the door, her shoulders squared and tense.

Do you think I came to your bed because I find you irresistible? Now she did need him, needed him unfeignedly. He would not make this easy for her. The sensation of resuming power was intoxicating. There was a low hum in his body, reminiscent of the sound the light panel in his office made when he flicked it on first thing in the morning.

Mandalay was already out the door when he found himself speaking. “Wait.”

Her footfall slowed.

“Wait,” he said again.

She appeared in the doorway, her expression wary.

“There is something. When Ulait and I were drawing, she talked about one of her heroes. Eshta? Eshta-something? A Vaik who swam among enemy ships and converted foreign women to the Vaik cause. Ulait spoke about one of the ships being preserved on the grounds somewhere.”

“Thank you,” said Mandalay wearily, fiddling with her pendant again. “Eshtakai. Yes, I know the ship. Ulait was always fond of that myth, even as a small child. We’ve checked the ship several times, but she hasn’t shown up there.”

“The Story-Keeping Houses, then.”

“We’ve checked them all. There’s no trace of her. It’s like she’s just,” Mandalay dropped the pendant and swam her hand through the air, “vanished.”

Jonathon recalled his own semi-frequent “disappearances” as a child: days when, infuriated by his mother’s version of history or being ignored by his brothers, he would take a packed lunch and his schoolbooks and climb into the canopy of a favourite tree. Most of the time his absences had gone unremarked, and he never drew attention to them in the interests of keeping his powder dry for the next time.

“I know you’re worried.” He chose his words carefully, screening them for resentment before he spoke, “but this is pretty normal teenage behaviour, at least where I come from. Teenagers get sulky and moody, and they act out.”

“Things are different here. You decide you want sex, no one contradicts you. You want to try sterysh, no one will stop you. You want to go to the outside, off you go. But even supposing you’re right and Ulait is acting out, there’s a sestyatesh coming. We need to account for everyone before we go into lockdown. Ulait knows this. She knows how important it is. The fact that she hasn’t shown up at one of the sentry posts makes me afraid that she’s injured herself. Fallen into a quarry or wandered off into the interior. If she can’t get to shelter before the storm comes . . .”

Daidd swung into the room, breathless and agitated. Even the waxy scars on his face were red. He placed his fists against his knees and bent over to recover. “The isvestyii . . . He’s gone . . . broke curfew . . . I’ve sent the reds out to check the northern and eastern sector, but—”

“The sestyatesh,” said Mandalay.

“Yes.”

Jonathon looked past Mandalay to the sky framed by his window. Clouds had amassed in such numbers and at such speed that the air was a rippling pewter. The wind whistled like an aircraft through the doubled grasses and the waves crashed at the rocks of the perimeter wall. Jonathon understood Mandalay’s dilemma. The Vaik promised that no excessive physical force would be used against the men at The Fortress; it was part of the deal. If she sent the reds out to find Ulait and recover the isvestyii, they’d be heading into an uncertain fate.

“I’ll go after them,” Jonathon said.

Mandalay looked at him—hard—for a few seconds. “That’s noble of you, Jonathon Bridge, but I cannot guarantee your safety. The Vaik cannot ask this of you.”

“I know. I’m going anyway.”

“Me too,” said Daidd. “We can divide up the grounds beyond the buildings. We can cover more ground if we split up.”

Mandalay was silent for a moment, again weaving the pendant back and forth along its chain. “It’s too much. It defies our covenant. We have responsibilities, to you, to your families.”

“The Vaik are my family now,” said Daidd. “They have been for a long time. You know this, Mandalay.” He spoke in a low voice and held her gaze. Jonathon looked from one to the other, and back again. There was an intimacy between them he hadn’t noticed before.

“Jonathon Bridge,” Mandalay said, “I cannot allow you to embark on this so soon after your release. You need some time.” But her eyes told another story. Go, they said. Go.

He was still angry with her and wanted to make her suffer. But not at Ulait’s expense. “I feel all right. I’m going.”

“Wait here,” said Mandalay. “I’ll be back shortly.” She left the room, glancing Daidd’s fingers with her own, leaving him and Jonathon alone.

Daidd moved to where Mandalay had stood at the window, looking out at the gathering storm. “The isvestyii can’t have gotten too far yet. He’s maybe an hour ahead of us, two at most. My guess is that he’s not after Ulait at all, he’s just using the storm as a cover to make a break for it.”

“But it makes no sense. There’s nowhere for him to go. He can’t scale the wall, he can’t hide indefinitely. If he makes it—god knows how—to the city, they’ll hand him straight back.” Jonathon bent his mind to a question. “Does he know that Ulait is missing?” Daidd stood very still, his unscarred profile towards Jonathon.

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Daidd. You and Mandalay . . . ?” He let the implied question fill the room.

“I love her,” he said simply.

Mandalay returned, bearing boots and maps. Other Vaik hurried in and out piling backpacks, flasks, tarpaulins and blankets on the bed. Mandalay handed a pair of boots each to Jonathon and Daidd; they were scuffed and rigid and the laces didn’t match. Jonathon perched on the side of his bed and pulled the boots on. Over the months his feet had callused and toughened until he barely noticed cold or heat under them. He wriggled his toes in the boots and stomped his feet. He felt clownish. He remembered what it was to feel the pinch of cufflinks at his wrists, the cinch of a tie at his neck. His gullet instinctively constricted in anticipation of the tie.

He was into his third season at The Fortress but, beyond fatherhood, had barely considered what shape his future life would take. Now, imagining his body encased in a business suit, he realised that he would not be returning to his old job at the firm, would no longer issue decrees from his office and feel the world moving around him like a masjythra. It was both a welcome and a terrifying thought.

“Thank you.” Mandalay took a steaming silver jug from a Vaik and poured cups for Daidd and Jonathon. Instinctively, Jonathon recoiled, but Mandalay pressed it on him. “It’s a strengthening brew,” she said. “It will revive you and sharpen your senses.”

Daidd took it without question and began to drink. Jonathon remembered how eager Daidd had been to drink the sterysh the day Mandalay fed them to the crones. He wondered if that was part of why Daidd stayed—the promise of a chemical high as reward for his obeisance. He felt a surge of anger towards Daidd. Hated his docility, his compliance, his love for his captor.

Daidd’s eyes met and held Jonathon’s across the room. He’s scared. Jonathon’s anger dissolved at once. The storm that was upon them was no inconvenient downpour—it was a sestyatesh. The storm of legend that flattened towns and placed the whole province on emergency alert. There’d been one in Jonathon’s living memory. He and his brothers had been excited by it, huddling against the reinforced glass windows of their parents’ home with bowls of popcorn. They’d exclaimed at the debris tossed through the ravening skies, their own boats and bikes and gazeboes securely tied down.

Now Jonathon was about to step into one, his body weaker than it had been in months and his state of mind precarious.

He sniffed the tea. It smelt of blood and bone, his wildman face reflected in the dark liquid. Steeling himself, he drank it down in several gulps. It tasted of salt and earth and left a mineral fuzz on his tongue. An acute warmth stole across his abdomen and then along his chest and extremities. Daidd’s working pupil bulged, contracted and bulged again. Jonathon’s ears buzzed, and the particulate nature of the storm became suddenly evident. Each raindrop was distinct from the rest, each tree buckling at its own frequency. Daidd and Jonathon glanced covertly at each other. What were they ingesting?

Then the world settled. Jonathon felt strong and centred, but slightly hyped. He wanted to run, box, fly.

Mandalay did not drink the tea. She smoothed a large map out on the bedspread. Jonathon’s eyes instinctively moved to the black dot that enclosed his home; the patchwork chair where Adalia would sit to breastfeed their daughter, her feet resting on the purple ottoman she’d won in a raffle. Jonathon was not afraid for them. Their home was strong and secure.

Mandalay’s hand was slightly a-tremble, but her voice was strong and clear. “We’ll split up, each of us taking one of three routes in broadly concentric arcs. I’ll take the outer arc here.” She traced a wide semicircle from their living quarters inland then back towards the final sentry post close to The Dryans.

Daidd followed the sweep of her hand then shook his head. “That could take you five or six days in these conditions, and there’s almost no shelter.”

“You question me, Daidd?” A look passed between them, palpable as a shove, but Daidd held her gaze. It made Jonathon flinch, and he was relieved when Mandalay said in a softened tone, “There’s a cave system along here.” She pointed to some triangles tipped onto their side. “If the way becomes impassable I can take shelter.”

One of the Vaik, a nuggety woman with cinder-grey hair, spoke. “The isvestyii won’t take the inland route, Mandalay. It’s too remote and unfamiliar. He’ll stay close to what he knows and risk the shortest route to The Dryans along the sentry posts.” She traced the line of the perimeter wall.

“I think you’re right,” Mandalay said. “But Ulait. What will Ulait do? Where has she gone?”

The hum of activity sheared away, making the storm seem abrasively loud. Thunder, hail and rain clambered over one another like drunk and belligerent members of an orchestra. Jonathon felt the room’s attention triangulate around him. He was the reason Ulait had run. He was a vow-breaker, and this was the consequence. He looked at the ground, heat rising in his face.

“Daidd, you’ll take the inner track through the northwestern sector. You know the huts and the way stations along there—check them all.” Mandalay paused. “The wells, too,” she said, barely audible.

Jonathon sucked in his breath, his eyes still on the ground where a vision of Ulait, blue-lipped under dark water, had materialised.

“Jonathon Bridge, you will take the perimeter wall as far as you can. You will stop at all the sentry posts. It may be that Ulait has taken refuge there, or that one of the sentries has seen her. If the way becomes impassable, you are to remain at a sentry post. That is an order.”

“The isvestyii—” Jonathon began, then stopped, unsure how to frame what he needed to say without making it a question. “We all suspect that he’s most likely to follow the established tracks to The Dryans and try to pass over there. That makes it most likely that me or Daidd will find him.”

He waited for the Vaik to respond to his unstated plea: what do I do if I find him?

Mandalay’s gold-flecked green gaze was steady. She seemed as stoic and remote as the statues he’d seen in museums on long-ago school excursions.

“I repeat again what I said before. You are under no obligation to undertake this. I tell you frankly that the Vaik cannot guarantee your physical safety and we are thereby breaking our covenant with you. You are free to remain here and no blame will attach to you. Indeed, I advise it.”

“I’m going,” he said. He still did not know if he could have behaved differently, made a different decision where Ulait was concerned. But he accepted that he had hurt her, and he would make reparations if he could.

Mandalay slipped a pack onto her back. A couple of Vaik helped Jonathon and Daidd to do the same. The packs were heavy, and would grow heavier still.

“You’ve provisions enough for three days,” said Mandalay. “Four if you’re careful. Let’s go.”