IV

CEB

They took the ramp to the front entrance and stepped into the wind. It caught Jonathon off guard. He staggered a few steps backwards, then righted himself by bending at a sharp angle into the gale. The masjythra took the tenor of the air and sealed around him. It covered his face, leaving a thin slit for his eyes and a baggy pouch around his mouth.

The three of them took the path as far as the orchard beyond the bathhouse, then diverged. Daidd placed his hand on Jonathon’s arm, then was gone, the silver of his masjythra dissolving into the air. Mandalay said something to Jonathon that he couldn’t hear above the din of the storm, then she too was gone, leaving him alone on the path that led to the perimeter wall and its sentry posts.

He adjusted his pack and bent for the wall. The path twisted and turned to avoid clusters of trees, so sometimes the storm pushed him from behind and sometimes belted him in the face. Visibility was so poor he could just make out his hand at full stretch away from his body. He paused every few steps to make sure the path remained under his feet and he wasn’t wandering blindly, and probably fatally, off course. The boots felt alien—hateful, weighty clods that slowed him down; he thought about taking them off.

Although he could not yet see it, Jonathon knew that he was approaching the wall because the storm sounded different, a great force encountering like resistance. Then the wall was there, barely centimetres in front of him. He reached out and touched the rough stone, craning his neck to see if the top of the wall was visible. From the city, The Fortress wall seemed white and even, like teeth. In fact it hugged the contours of the sea and land, low where jagged rocks or deep ocean made escape impossible, high near The Dryans and the city. The rain struck the wall slantwise, then slingshot into the exposed parts of Jonathon’s body, stinging his fingers and lower calves.

Most of what he knew about the wall he’d gleaned from Ulait and the reading he’d done before he came to The Fortress. Parts of the wall were nearly a thousand years old. It was constantly refortified by stone from the quarry. This indiscriminate mixing of the old and the new had at first struck him as odd, as insufficiently reverent of the past. Now he understood that the fountains and statues of his city were preserved precisely because they were relics. A living culture has no need to petrify itself.

Jonathon knew that the sentry posts started about two kilometres from the cluster of quarters and buildings where most of the Vaik and their charges lived. The posts grew more frequent the closer the wall came to The Dryans.

He stayed close to the wall and trudged forward, stopping sometimes to huddle against the stone when the wind grew too fierce. After a while, the ceaseless thud of the rain and the whoosh of his breath—loud within the bubble of the masjythra around his mouth—assumed a hypnotic rhythm. Ensnared in fog and unable to see much in any direction, he began to wonder if he was still underground. Perhaps he remained in the cell, and his search for Ulait was merely his mind enacting a sentence of judgement and amends.

The idea grew into a certainty. He was imagining this: all of this. The thunder, the lightning, the pack gnawing on his shoulders. He was conjuring it all from his subterranean prison. The Vaik, masters of potions, had doctored his tea to summon precisely this hallucination. The thought then came to him that if he was the architect of this hallucination, he could be the architect of any hallucination. He could render any thought, any fancy, as real as this one. He could preside at his own sentencing.

And so he began to imagine that he was in The Quiet Room at work the night of the Christmas party. He had not fucked Jureece. Instead, once they had helped Clara to the sofa he had asked Jureece to find a bottle of water, a face washer and a bucket, but to do it discreetly. He also asked her to keep an eye out for Adalia and let her know where he was when she showed up.

With Jureece gone, Jonathon placed his jacket around Clara and brushed her hair back from her waxen face. He wiped the vomit from her mouth with his handkerchief, forcing down his revulsion at the smell. His plan was to let her throw up the worst of it—then, with Jureece and Adalia’s help, manoeuvre her through the stairwell (where there was the least chance of being seen) and into a taxi, away from the main entrance.

He switched off the overhead light and told Clara to rest, settling himself on the carpet beside the sofa. In the luminous blue of the tank and the rhythmic swish of the darting fish, he began to feel drowsy. He must have dozed for a while, for he was awoken by a scuffle. He thought Jureece must have returned, but when he spoke her name she didn’t say anything. Clara emitted a low, strangled growl from deep within her throat, and Jonathon turned to reassure her. That was when he made out a dark figure clambering on top of her.

Jonathon sprang to his feet and grabbed the man about the shoulders, but he clung fast to Clara. Jonathon kneed the man in the side of his ribcage—hard—then, feeling his grip on Clara slacken, Jonathon pulled him to the floor. The man rolled over as he fell and sprawled at Jonathon’s feet, staring upwards. Jonathon retracted his foot to kick the man in the face, then stumbled in recognition. The face staring up at him was his own.

Tea, thought Jonathon. The Vaik have doctored my tea. Every thought I have, every imagining, every daydream is going to end here: with my guilt.

So it was that sometime later, he was not surprised when there was a lull in the storm and he saw the isvestyii ahead of him. They had arrived at a stretch of wall that came only to about chest height on the land side then fell in a sheer drop towards the water. Below them the sea heaved over the rocks.

The isvestyii was staring intently at the water, his hands balled into fists on top of the wall, his knuckles white. Rain streamed off his masjythra. The look on his face was one of utter desolation. If I didn’t know him, Jonathon thought, I would feel sorry for him.

“You’ll never make it,” Jonathon said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain.

The isvestyii, intent on the grey sea below, seemed not to hear him.

The storm had retreated, and in the heightened light Jonathon could just see the outline of a sentry post along the curve of the wall. It was five, maybe six hundred metres away. Perhaps a Vaik had the two of them in view down the barrel of her binoculars and would soon be marching out from her lowered drawbridge, ordering them to take shelter. But maybe not. Jonathon looked around for a weapon of some kind, a rock or a sheared bough. If none of this is real, he told himself, I don’t need a weapon. So why did he feel such fear?

He bent, slowly, to pick up a flat slab of rock bleached white by the sun and rain, then took a tentative step towards the isvestyii.

“You’ll never make it,” Jonathon repeated. “There’s no point.” The isvestyii’s eyes slid from the sea and rested, vacantly, on Jonathon. Jonathon pushed his masjythra back from his head so the isvestyii could see him plainly, but even then his presence seemed barely to register. Perhaps, Jonathon thought, we’re bothhallucinating. He flinched at the thought of the nightmares the Vaik would send after the isvestyii. What horrors could equal his guilt?

The clouds rolled back in the ivestyii’s eye and Jonathon felt his pupils locate him. It was like being caught in a crosshair.

“You.”

“Me.”

The isvestyii’s gaze shifted to the rock in Jonathon’s hand. “Are you going to kill me?”

“If I have to.”

“The Woman has decreed that you will judge in this matter.” The isvestyii repeated Laliya’s words in a dull, flat monotone. “Will that make you happy? To fulfil a prophecy?”

Jonathon shrugged. “Can’t say I care much for prophecy.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Did you think the Vaik would just wait the storm out while you stalked Ulait?”

“Who?”

Jonathon tested the heft of the stone in his hand. “Don’t bullshit me. You know what I’m talking about.”

The isvestyii shook his head slightly, a dismissive gesture as if Jonathon was distracting him from something important. He turned back to the pitching sea. He unclenched his fists and flattened his hands on top of the wall, bent his elbows, then sprang up. He hung there, struggling to find a toehold, then hoisted himself onto the wall, lying flat against it.

Jonathon dropped the rock and launched himself at the man’s torso, trying to tip him back towards land. It’s my dream, Jonathon thought, back in The Quiet Room where I pulled the man who was me off Clara.

The isvestyii kicked his legs and thrust his arms out to shake Jonathon off, but he was at a disadvantage on his belly, flailing like a turtle. Jonathon held fast, pressing his knees against the wall. The isvestyii stopped kicking and hugged the wall tightly. They were at an impasse; the meeting point of their twinned nightmares.

“There’s nowhere for you to go,” Jonathon insisted. “You can’t climb down to the sea, and even if you jump and somehow live, you can’t swim in that wash. You wouldn’t last a minute.”

Jonathon felt the tension leave the man’s body, and he thought that the isvestyii saw the sense in his words and was about to roll onto the ground. Instead, the isvestyii carefully rose to a sitting position, one leg on either side of the wall like he was riding a horse. He held his palms up towards Jonathon in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to escape.”

“Then what are you—?” Jonathon looked again at the pounding sea, the drop to the rocky outcrop, and understood.

“Can you imagine what it’s like,” the isvestyii said quietly, so Jonathon struggled to hear him, “to want what I want?”

“I’ll never feel sorry for you.”

“Then you can help me.”

Jonathon almost laughed aloud. “Why the fuck would I help you?”

“Because you hate me. I’ve been staring at this water for what seems like hours. A few seconds. A minute at most and it would be over. All over. I want nothingness. I want the absence of this”—he slapped his head—“what goes on in here. In my body. But I can’t jump. I just can’t do it.”

“You don’t deserve death. You don’t deserve suicide, at any rate. A slow death being quartered by a Vaik blade, maybe. You owe pain to your victims.”

The isvestyii’s eyes were wild, his face a shadow play of hollows and rings. “Pain. What do you know about pain, Suit boy? For years I fought. Every day since I was thirteen, at least, I’ve had this in me. Always pushing it down. Drinking it down. Piling normality onto it. A wife, a job, my own kids, a backyard with a basketball hoop. A car in the driveway that I washed by hand on the weekends. Took my kids to football practice. And I loved those kids. Like, normal love. They were the best thing about me. I thought they’d saved me, I really did. Because the idea of anything happening to my kids was just—” He shook his head. “It was more than I could imagine. So how could I be a man who could do that to someone else’s child? But all the time there was this . . . this thing festering in me. Bleeding out in my dreams until it got so I was scared to go to sleep.

“I felt it spreading, infecting. I closed the door on it, but it oozed out the sides. I was hosting my kid’s birthday party and handing out lollybags with a party hat on and I wanted to scream, ‘Run children, run along home!’ And they left but they came back in my dreams and in the dreams they wanted me, too.

“And I started to think . . . it wouldn’t be so bad. There’s worse things. Maybe it would be like lancing a boil. Do it once and get it out of my system. Make myself whole again.”

The isvestyii’s body shook, a tremor that ran from his legs to his neck. The hands he’d been holding outwards, supplicant, shot upwards and ripped at the roots of his hair.

“It won’t stop. It will never stop. You think I care about being made isvestyii?” A low and guttural sound left his mouth, bearing a thin line of drool. “It was a mercy. A mercy. The idea of blankness. Of nothingness. Absence of wanting, resisting, wanting all just . . . gone. But being told you are dissolving doesn’t make it so.” He ran his shaking hands down the sides of his face, his nails drawing blood along his cheeks.

“Wake up,” Jonathon shouted. “Wake up!”

He yelled it into the wind, as loud as he could. He slapped himself, hard, with an open palm on his vulnerable cheekbone. But he didn’t wake up. The layer-cake walls of the cell did not swirl before his opening eyes. He remained there, by the perimeter wall of The Fortress, where a child rapist begged him for mercy in the eye of a storm.

“You have a child, don’t you, Suit boy?”

The isvestyii pushed his tongue through his clenched teeth. It protruded—pink, meaty and glistening—between the wet, yellow slabs. Jonathon shuddered and fought down nausea. Slowly, very slowly, the isvestyii drew both feet onto the wall, keeping his eyes on Jonathon. When Jonathon did not react he steadied himself, crouching, then drew himself to a standing position. He threw his arms out for balance, a cross swaying in the wind. Jonathon felt the primeval attachment to breath, the evolutionary ballast holding the man’s feet to the stone. Jonathon squeezed his eyes tight shut, then opened them.

Then he reached out and shoved the isvestyii off the wall. There was a falling shimmer, then nothing. Just the regathering clouds and the dark line where the sea met the sky. Jonathon forced himself to look down. The wall dropped about fifty metres. There was no beach, just fangs of rock bared and unbared with the surge of the sea. He lingered long enough to be sure, then turned away and trudged on towards the sentry post.

Part of Adalia’s job at the paper was to cover the high-profile trials. She would come home at night and splay her notes and transcripts on the coffee table in their lounge room. Jonathon would ring for takeaway and pour glasses of red wine. Adalia sipped it as she read, occasionally muttering to herself as she circled words and highlighted passages. Jonathon would crib space from the papers on the table for the food and sit on the floor to eat, propped up against a beanbag.

“Mentions . . . summary proceedings . . . recklessness as to intent,” he read at random from one of the transcripts, “vicarious liability . . . strict liability . . . Is this even in English?”

“A very particular English with a very particular intent.”

“What’s that? Bamboozle the punters so they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth?”

“Partly,” Adalia nodded as she forked noodles into her mouth, “but there’s something deeper going on.” She chewed vigorously, excited as the ideas took shape in her mind. “These legal words and concepts, they’ve been refined over centuries. What might have started out as a rock five hundred years ago is now agreed, by a painstaking process of elimination and taxonomy, to be a grain of sand. People, when they come to the courts, get to feel like they’re in the flow of centuries of accumulated wisdom. Everything’s been codified, from the greetings to the seating to the gowns to the order of events. It gives comfort to people, it really does. Even those who are found guilty get something out of the ritual.”

“Like what?”

“A part in a familiar play where everyone takes their role seriously. A chorus, an audience.”

Jonathon now understood what Adalia had meant. He felt entirely alone. Atomised. For the rest of his life he would carry the image of the man clawing against the pewter sky and the grey sea that closed over his head. The isvestyii bobbed up once, managed a lungful of air, then was yanked downwards as though by a giant hand. He disappeared from view, and Jonathon thought it was over, but then the sea offered him up—alive—on the hand of a wave, then curled and dragged him down again. Jonathon kept seeing this offering and retraction as he splashed towards the sentry post.

He didn’t feel pity for the isvestyii, and would not have wished him alive again had he the power to do so. But how to assimilate what had happened? Jonathon wanted to be called before The Great Hall to account for himself. He wanted to hand himself over to The Woman so she could compartmentalise his innocence and his guilt, then unify them into a neat and authoritative judgement. Yet, instinctively he knew that he would not be summonsed, and he alone would have to preside over the day’s events. When The Woman had said he would judge, this was what she’d meant.

In The Arbour Room, ten minutes after his inquisitors left, the concierge came to Jonathon’s rescue just as Adalia had said he would. If he was surprised to find Jonathon shackled to a chair, he did not show it. He inserted the tiny key into the handcuffs and then, while Jonathon stood up and shook his arms to restore feeling, he asked, seemingly without irony, “If sir would care for a brandy?” Sir drank the brandy, then staggered outside to find his car. Barely considering where he was going and why, he drove to his parents’ home.

Jonathon killed the engine and looked up at the imposing house where he had grown up. Through the open curtains he watched his parents entertaining their guests. “We are entertaining this weekend,” his mother would announce when he was a boy, as if she and his father shunted from dull to amusing at precisely 6 p.m. on a Friday evening. Watching a waiter edge around a guest with a tray of canapés, Jonathon felt fury savage him, all bared teeth and ragged claws. Fury at Adalia for the outrageousness of what she had done. Fury at Clara’s and Yasmin’s accusations. Fury at the realisation that his child was being carried in a body that wanted nothing to do with him. Fury at biology, fury at the world. Fury that he found himself, at the age of forty-two, sitting in his car in his parents’ driveway on a cold autumn evening.

He let himself into the house and took a glass of wine from a circulating tray. He noticed the ridges on his wrists from where the handcuffs had been. He downed the wine within three steps. He took another one and headed for the kitchen where he knew he would find whisky. He was riffling through the cupboards when he felt his mother’s eyes on his back.

“Good evening, Mother,” he said, without looking up.

“Jonathon. What a lovely surprise.”

“Is it?” He took the bottle to the sideboard, found a glass and ice, and poured five generous fingers. He was mesmerised by the slow turn of the ice in the amber liquid.

“What’s happened?” his mother asked.

“Adalia.” Jonathon took a slug. “Adalia, she . . . she . . .”

“Adalia what? Jonathon, what is it?”

He stared at his mother, erect and immaculate in her frosted-pink twinset, and realised that Adalia had snookered him. How could he tell anyone—let alone his mother—about what had happened to him that afternoon? That he had been expecting a saucy rendezvous with his wife, but instead found himself handcuffed to a chair and interrogated about his adultery, his workplace practices and his possible complicity in a rape. That he had been kicked out of his own home and advised of his impending fatherhood in virtually the same breath. There was no way to package up the event that left him free of ridicule or suspicion.

“Adalia has left me,” he stuttered.

“I see.” His mother’s expertly made-up mouth drew into a thin, crimson-coloured line.

“I need a place to stay.” He raised the glass to his mouth again, his hand shaking. “Temporarily.”

His mother’s appraising gaze moved from him to the kitchen doors and the sound of tinkling glasses and conversation on the other side. “You’re welcome to join us, of course, but no doubt you wish to be alone at this,” she paused, “difficult time. I’ll have one of the guestrooms in the new wing prepared.”

Jonathon was about to ask why he couldn’t just go to his old room when he realised that this would require reentering the party to take the stairs to his former bedroom. His mother was hiding him. “Thank you,” he managed.

She nodded. “I’ll have a tray sent up.” She reached out and tentatively touched Jonathon’s arm; her mouth twitched, as if she were about to say something but then thought better of it. She disappeared through the swinging doors and Jonathon heard her remark to a guest that this was “just one of his impromptu visits.”

Jonathon took the whisky and the ice bucket to his room, shattering sparks of rage as he went. He stood by the window and looked out at the blue shimmer of the pool, drinking, as a maid fussed about with pillowcases and fresh towels behind him. She left the room and returned with a tray of food purloined from the party. “Your mother says to eat something,” she said. Jonathon looked at the maid, remembering how he had profited from his Uncle Jasper’s liaison with one of the staff years before. Could it have been this woman? “An extortionist,” Adalia had called him, though not unkindly. “A maximiser of opportunity,” he had countered.

He wondered now, about that woman. His Uncle Jasper was a fat, sweaty big-noter. It was hard to imagine that the woman had given way to him in a fit of passion. Had Jasper promised her something—a better job, perhaps? Or had he found her out in some misdemeanour and used it to bargain his way down her pants? Jonathon recognised Adalia in the direction his thoughts were heading, bringing on a fresh fit of rage. Not only had his wife tricked him and dumped him, she was colonising his thoughts, taking him over.

In the days that followed, rage shadowed Jonathon. He felt electric with it, as though if he clapped his hands sparks would fly. His mother began shaping his silence about the separation into a palatable narrative. When boxes of his clothes and paintings arrived in a van, he had done “the gentlemanly thing” and left Adalia the apartment. The pregnancy shocked his mother at first, but soon became the plausible instigator of the separation. “What you’re prepared to put up with for yourself, you draw the line at where a child is involved”—though what precisely Jonathon was not prepared to put up with she did not say.

His workmates treated him with caution, taking care not to fuel his anger. He emitted blasts of preemptive aggression into the most innocuous encounters, until people began to avoid him. Colleagues made excuses not to attend one-on-one meetings. He imagined that the poodles, who would once have taken every opportunity to attract his attention, tossed coins to see which of them would have to take him his coffee. He noticed the way conversations tapered off when he entered rooms, and he became convinced he was the subject of gossip. Fear of ridicule stoked his anger higher.

He was at work when Adalia made the first contact since their encounter at The Arbour Room. Her name flashed up on his desk phone and all the air quit his body. He reached for the handpiece, watching his fingers closing on it in slow motion. “Hello?”

“Hello, Jonathon.” She sounded tense, distressed. “Look, I’m sorry to call you at work and without any warning. I just didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.”

“Hear what?” Silence on the other end. “For god’s sake, Adalia, hear what?”

She drew a breath. “Jonathon, I’ve just heard from Jureece. She told me . . . she told me that Clara has died.”

“What? What happened?”

“She died by suicide.” A long pause down the phone. He listened to Adalia breathing on the other end, picturing the oxygen flowing into her, across the barrier in her belly and towards the fledgling lungs of his child. “Jonathon? Jonathon, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. How did she . . . How did she . . . exit?”

“She hanged herself. I thought you would want to know.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Of course.” There was warmth in her voice. He wanted to pour himself down the phone, along the wires and into her arms. “I’ll email you the details of the funeral. I mean, not that you have to go. I just thought—”

“I’ll be there. I’ll let everyone at work know, too.”

“Okay.”

He cleared his throat. “How are you? How’s the pregnancy?”

“I’m doing all right, all things considered. I didn’t exactly plan on single parenthood.” Jonathon squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the phone tightly in his fist. “The morning sickness is a trial. My complexion has this attractive radioactive-green hue until about eleven every day.” She attempted a laugh.

“We will need to talk, Adalia. About the baby.”

“I know. I know we will. I’m nearly there, I just need a little more time.”

“When you’re ready.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay.”

“So I’ll send through the details about the funeral now. I’ll see you there. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I just thought . . . I thought it would be even worse if you had to hear it from someone else.” Despite everything, he realised that Adalia was trying to spare him the terrible shock of hearing it from one of his colleagues, someone who might pass over it with an off-colour joke.

“I’m glad you told me, Adalia. Take care. We’ll talk soon, yeah?”

“Yes. Bye.”

The phone clicked and the receiver buzzed. Jonathon returned it to its cradle and mechanically opened his emails. He jotted down the details Adalia sent him, picked up his files and phone, and headed for his next meeting. Hearing from Adalia had quelled his rage and left a terrible emptiness in its place. He felt voided. In the meeting he clicked his pen, opened his notepad and gave every sign of being attentive as his colleagues relayed the monthly results. He nodded at the appropriate times, and looked as if there was much he could say when they discussed rumours of insider-trading at a rival firm.

“Well, that about wraps it up for the formal agenda items. Is there any other business?”

Jonathon waited for Arie to remind his colleagues about the end-of-financial-year bowling event being hosted by Finance, then said, “I have some news.” The table turned to him. “You will remember Clara Fitzgerald; she was one of last year’s graduates.” There was a ripple in the room, as if everyone was trying to move out of the channel of a noxious fart without drawing attention to its presence. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Clara is dead. She committed suicide. Her funeral will be held on Friday morning. I’ll provide the details of the service to HR.”

“That is sad news,” said the head of Legal, “very sad news. I’m not sure, though, that we should make a public comment about the deceased.”

“Who’s making a public comment? I’m merely advising you that a former colleague has passed away in the saddest of circumstances and that her funeral is on Friday for anyone who wants to pay their respects.”

“That’s all well and good, Jonathon, but given the circumstances in which Ms. Fitzgerald left the firm, the presence of any of our staff at the funeral will be taken as public comment. Any official correspondence from Human Resources to the office about Ms. Fitzgerald’s death may well be subpoenaed if there is any . . . any unpleasantness surrounding her death.”

“Clara hanged herself. I think we’ve reached peak unpleasantness, don’t you?”

“Don’t be such a cretin, Jonathon. You know how these things get out of hand.”

“Have we considered, though”—it was Alexandra, the director of HR and the only woman in the room—“the optics of not having a presence at the funeral? That might play even worse.”

“The optics?” Jonathon asked. “Jesus Christ, Alex, the optics?”

“Yes, Jonathon, the optics.” She met his gaze across the table.

“Clara Fitzgerald was a fine young woman who made a solid contribution during her year here. I’m sorry to hear of her death. But there is precisely nothing we can do to change it. What we can do is manage the fallout from her passing in a way that protects this firm and Clara’s memory.”

“I’m sorry, but perhaps you can explain to me what Clara’s memory needs to be protected from exactly?”

His colleagues looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. They were trying to be tolerant and patient with him, he knew, because of his recent separation. But at the same time that tolerance had a limit, and he was discovering its precise location. Clara had interrupted how things are. Dropped a pebble in their collective shoe. This was so self-evident that Jonathon’s obtuseness bordered on facile.

Jonathon was early to the funeral. He parked his car and waited. It was a cold, dull day, threatening rain. Several times he reached into his inside pocket to be sure the envelope was still there. He watched Adalia’s car drive in: an orange retro number he had bought for her birthday several years ago. She had offered it to him on the inventory of their shared goods through her lawyer, but Jonathon had refused. It was a gift.

Adalia left the car and began walking to the church. A tightness spread across Jonathon’s chest. She looked very much the same and yet entirely different. Her gait had changed to accommodate the growing life within her. She seemed more flat-footed. Her hair was mostly hidden under a luxe blue scarf but he could tell she had stopped dyeing it. For the baby, he assumed.

He quickly exited his vehicle and stepped nimbly across the car park. He didn’t want to startle her unduly. He stopped shy of the entrance where she was sure to see him.

Adalia gripped the handle of her bag a little tighter as she approached. That she was stressed was clear, but she attempted a smile. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

They stood there, each at a loss, as mourners began to file into the church.

Jonathon cleared his throat. “Adalia, can I have a word?”

She glanced towards the church, her fingers still clenched around her bag strap. “I think the service is about to start.”

“It won’t take long. It’s important.”

She hesitated, glancing again at the church. Jonathon resisted the urge to take her by the elbow and usher her a little further from the entrance.

“Please.”

Adalia nodded and he gestured for her to follow him. By the side of the church was a laneway of close trees that gave them some shelter from the congregation. Each tree had a little plaque in front of it, commemorating the lost and valorous of some far-flung war.

Jonathon reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope. “I wanted you to have this.” He passed it to Adalia.

“Jonathon, this really isn’t necessary. I’m fine for money. I do earn a wage, you know.”

“It’s not money.”

“Then what? Divorce papers?”

“What? No!” His heart shook at the thought. “No. No, Adalia, it’s a DNA test. I took one and volunteered it to the police. It shows that I wasn’t the one who—” His voice faltered. “It shows that I’m not Clara’s rapist.”

“Oh, Jonathon,” she said softly. “Is that what this is about?” She shook her head, her expression incredulous. “How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you really think I would have engineered The Arbour Room if I thought you’d raped Clara?”

“What?”

“Of course I knew. If I thought you were guilty we would have had a very different conversation. And I would have gone to the police.”

Jonathon felt off balance. Outmanoeuvred in a game where he had misunderstood the rules. “But I . . . I don’t understand.”

“I know,” she said sadly. “That’s the problem.” She handed back the envelope, unopened. “We’d really better go in.”

He followed her towards the church and into a pew near the back. As she sat down, Adalia’s bump was visible. Jonathon disciplined himself not to stare, forcing his gaze forward. The service was well attended, and he could clearly differentiate between people who had known Clara before and those who’d known her after her move to the city. The afters wore muted suits and spoke softly among themselves; the befores were overweight and sobbed voluptuously. Jonathon noticed Alexandra and the firm’s CFO taking a seat towards the front with the other afters. There to keep an eye on him, he suspected.

He was keenly aware of the letter in his jacket, close to his heart. The brief, impersonal analysis of his DNA indicating a less than 0.0003 percent match with the semen collected in Clara’s rape kit. He’d thought it was absolution.

The service began with a blare of music, a sentimental anthem attached to a football team that all of the befores knew. They sang with gusto, some of them standing to punch the air during a line in the chorus. Embarrassed for them, Jonathon looked down at the program.

He was overwhelmed by Adalia’s presence, by the knowledge that his baby-to-be was within reach. He hadn’t expected that the test results would effect an immediate reconciliation, but he had thought they would clear some debris from the road. Reveal the path.

When Clara’s father—a small, dignified man with the strained posture and large hands of a physical labourer—took to the podium, Jonathon tried to focus his attention. Clara’s father spoke in a halting voice about his winsome child, her childhood obsession with ice-skating and, later, with statistics. Pictures of Clara were projected onto a screen and the sobbing grew louder. A gap-toothed child, reserved and quizzical, slowly assumed the shape of the woman Jonathon recognised. A short, mousy blonde with a pronounced birthmark—attractive in her way but plain next to Jureece. He remembered with shame the dismissive comments about “the runt poodle” that he had not corrected, had barely registered. Jonathon began to cry.

He could not recall the last time he’d cried, but it must have been when he was a boy. He wept openly, surrendering to the physicality of it. He cried great ratcheting sobs, a painful clutch in his chest. He heaved for breath through the narrowing tunnels of his nose and throat. The water astounded him. There was so much of it. Adalia handed him tissues. Why was he crying? He hadn’t known Clara well, and his few engagements with her were meshed with shame. Her not being there didn’t rip a Clara-shaped hole in his life. But he was stricken. Stricken by his wife’s presence and by an overpowering regret. By the sense of what he had lost and would yet lose.

Adalia stood by him in the fine drizzle as the coffin was laid into the ground. He didn’t drop a handful of earth with the other mourners, feeling he’d no right to it. The priest intoned the formula, reminding them that, in the end, this fate awaits us all. When the priest had finished speaking and offered what solace he could to Clara’s immediate family, the mourners began to disperse. The family handed Jonathon a card that thanked him for coming and invited him to a wake to be held in The Dryans

“Are you going?” Adalia asked.

He shook his head. “I’d feel like an intruder. Are you?”

She nodded and he could tell by the set of her teeth that she was steeling herself for it. “I promised Jureece. Besides, I feel like I owe Clara something. I know that doesn’t stand up to reason. But there it is.”

It began to rain in earnest. Jonathon and Adalia took shelter in his car. She wiped her damp face with her scarf. Water beads glistened in her hair, her regrowth light at the roots.

“I don’t think you should drive, Jonathon. You’re in no fit state.”

He let the latest wave of sobs move through him. It was like having diarrhoea. He just had to let it run its course. He rubbed his thumb against a smudge on the steering wheel, waiting until he could talk. “Have you noticed how when shit goes wrong or bad things happen, people say ‘There was nothing I could have done’ or ‘I didn’t see it coming,’ and most of the time that’s probably true. There’s some comfort in that lack of power. But I could have done something here. I actually have power. Some real power. And I didn’t use it.”

“I don’t think you can hold yourself responsible for Clara’s suicide. The reasons people kill themselves are complex. Jureece told me she thought Clara was doing well. Happy in her new job. Getting over . . . what happened. You’re not perfect, Jonathon, but you didn’t kill her.”

“No. I know that. But I sure as fuck didn’t save her either. At every step along the way since what happened happened, I could have made a material difference. That’s the thing, Adalia. I could have pushed for an internal inquiry like Clara said. I could have made a fuss and people would have had to listen. I’m a director and a shareholder. They wouldn’t have liked it but they would have had to listen. Clara was easy to ignore. I’m not, but I still just”—he waved his hand, as if reaching for something in the air—

“Maybe that’s better,” Adalia said in a low voice. “I accuse myself of the opposite. Clara didn’t want to be involved in my little set piece at The Arbour Room. Said she just needed to put the whole thing behind her. I convinced her otherwise. How articulate I was, how fulsome on the topic of justice and responsibility and taking back control. Of what we owe to other women. But really, was I just out for revenge? Was she just useful to me as someone who could help me hurt you?”

“You’re not a vengeful person.”

“Not usually, no. But I think I went a bit mad for a while there. Jureece told me, you know, about what happened between the two of you. She was so young and so guilt-ridden, I think she just needed someone to confess to. When I found out about Clara, the whole thing became a crusade.”

He smiled wryly. “Well, crusades are your thing.”

“I know, right?” She laughed bitterly. “I’m the proverbial dog with a bone. Refugees, hunger, exploitation in The Dryans, give me a hint of injustice and I’m away. The intrepid journalist on the case. I just couldn’t admit to myself that this was personal. That you’d broken me.”

He sucked in his breath. “Please don’t say that.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. It’s a risk you take when you love someone. You can’t be in love and keep your power. It doesn’t work that way. I’m putting myself back together. Slowly. I just hope bubs isn’t imbibing all this trauma through the umbilical cord.” She spoke to her belly, “You doing okay in there, kid?”

Jonathon’s heart lurched again. He kept his eyes on the rain through the front windscreen and asked what he needed to ask. “Is there any hope for us, Adalia?”

He could feel her concentration from the seat next to him. Empires rose and fell in the seconds before she answered. He held himself very still, anticipating a tip into grief that would swallow him whole.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jonathon. I’d like there to be. For me and for the baby. But I don’t trust you.”

“What happened with me and Jureece . . . and Yasmin. It will never happen again. I promise you.”

She waved the words away. “It’s not actually the physical stuff, the sexual stuff, that’s the issue for me. Although I won’t pretend I have a lot of trust in that regard. It’s something else. It’s got to do with you, Jonathon, with who you are.”

“I’m the same man you fell in love with.”

“I know. It’s not as if I didn’t know about the . . . the less savoury elements of your personality. I thought I was the woman to tame you.” She laughed. “God, I’m such a cliché.”

“You’re anything but a cliché, Adalia.”

“I was fascinated by you. Your stories. Beguiled by the entree you gave me to your world. But I think there’s something in you that’s faulty, or just not there at all. Like some empathy gene is missing. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I were to cut you open, if there’d be . . . blankness. A lot of energy, yes, and electricity and anger . . . but no—I don’t know how to put this without sounding like a cheap pop-psychologist—no core. No furnace where all this energy is coming from. I don’t think you deliberately set out to hurt me, or Clara or Jureece or Yasmin or anyone, really. But there was nothing in you stopping it, either. I’m not making much sense. I’m trying to articulate something I’m only just beginning to understand.”

He was silent for a moment, still feeling himself teetering on that precipice. “You’re right. Or, at least, you’re in the ballpark of right. I’ve often felt like there was something missing. Some switch or valve. Most people I know are missing it too, but they don’t know it. Or they don’t care. I do care. I just don’t know what to do about it. One thing I do know. I want to be a good father to this baby. Whether we’re together or not, I want to be—I will be—a good father.”

“And what’s that, Jonathon? What does a ‘good father’ look like?”

“He’s present. He’s hands-on. He understands that the child is a unique little individual, not some extension of himself. He loves his child fiercely. Primally. But he holds himself in check because he knows the child has to find their own way.”

“God.” Adalia wiped a tear from her cheek. “When you get it right, you really get it right. How can you be so great and such an irredeemable shit at the same time?”

“Tell me what to do, Adalia. Anything you want, I will do it. You see something in me, you know you do. I want to dredge that part of myself up to the surface, feed it and make it bigger. Tell me what you want me to do, how to fix this.”

“The Fortress.”

“What?”

“You could apply to go to The Fortress as a supplicant.”

He burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?”

“I just . . . It seems—bizarre. Under the circumstances.”

“What do you mean?”

He cleared his throat. “I would be required, at The Fortress, to, you know, go to bed with the Vaik. Since infidelity is part of our problem, it just seems bizarre to go somewhere it would be a requirement.”

Adalia shook her head slightly. “You still don’t get it, do you? You need to learn insignificance, Jonathon. You need to know what that’s like. How it feels.”

He rubbed his thumb against his temple, trying—genuinely—to understand what Adalia meant. “You know, I don’t actually go through my life meditating on my own spectacular importance. I don’t really think about myself much at all.”

“I know. You just exist. A priori. Beyond examination. The Vaik could change that.”

He held his thumb at his temple and considered the wan, desultory day. A nothing day. Drizzle and greyness that won’t dignify itself with a storm.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Thank you.”

That night he found the Department of Justice website and, with some difficulty, navigated his way to the Vaik page. It was largely blank: just a link to an application form.

While he waited for the form to load, he poured himself a generous whisky and watched the last of the day drop over the horizon. He was in the large kitchen at his parents’ home, the one that pumped out the industrial-sized catering for their soirees. As a child, he and his brothers had loved this room. It was a ship: the octagonal window bay the prow, and the gleaming oven-hoods the flues atop the coal fires. They’d run the taps for the sound of water and shipwrecked themselves on the ocean-blue tiles.

Jonathon felt his body tilting, reorienting. Adalia had thrown him a buoy and he would cleave to it. He sat down, gulped whisky and surveyed the form. Disbelieving, he read again. The first field did not ask for his name, address or date of birth. Instead, stark in Times New Roman, was a question.

Are you a good man?

A strange sound escaped his throat, something between a snort and a guffaw. He stabbed at the tab key but the cursor did not move.

Are you a good man?

And there, beside it, check boxes next to “yes” and “no.”

This time he laughed properly and stood up to give full vent to his mirth. He moved again to the prow of the ship and surveyed the night sky. He wondered what Adalia was doing. Probably making dinner. He wanted to call her to tell her about the question on the form, but he doubted she would find it as funny as he did.

A blank resistance rose up in him—a choking, indignant feeling. What a ridiculous question. An absurd, unanswerable

But are you?

He heard the question in Adalia’s voice, barrelling at him as if from across a vast plain. He downed the whisky, poured another one and sat down again.

The cursor blinked at the end of the question, waiting. He pressed the tab key, but he could not progress without providing an answer. He opened a new tab and typed in “Vaik history.” He began to read, keeping to the sites that Adalia had told him were credible.

The night blackened and thickened and the bottle shallowed as he read. The outline of the information was more or less familiar to him from school: one civilisation coming across the sea—his ancestors, you would call them—to take possession of Vaik land. And why not? The land was fertile and rich in natural resources. To tussle over such things was inevitable.

The Vaik had inhabited the land for thousands of years, securing their civilisation with “reproduction treaties.” The Vaik traded crops, animals and minerals for access to men. Twice a year an assortment of men from the surrounding territories would be granted safe passage across the patrolled borders. In those days, Vaik land was not fully enclosed and included all that Jonathon thought of as his country. Incursions into Vaik territory were answered with swift and deadly force. They did not happen very often.

The men who came to the Vaik were carefully selected. Only those who had produced healthy children, and were themselves physically and mentally sound, were eligible. Farmers and musicians were favoured over tradesmen, sailors and nobility, and each man had to be able to trace their maternal lineage for at least four generations. Fourteen years after he was first selected, a man was exempt because of consanguinity. Historians differed as to whether the men had volunteered for the task or were nominated by a council. Choice or force. Desire or duty. Or perhaps neither one nor the other, just a tradition. A seasonal practice like thatching a roof or ploughing a field.

What struck Jonathon as he read was how sanitised the version of events he’d learned in high-school had been. His textbooks had suggested a short skirmish between the invaders and the Vaik with minimal loss of life. The victors were magnanimous and allowed the Vaik to retain a reduced parcel of territory. But that wasn’t how it was.

The colonists arrived in an armada and tried to take The Fortress by sea. The Vaik had the advantage of higher ground and cannons and were able to repel the enemy. They were also cunning, infusing mutiny among the women of the ships, something that the invaders were slow to recognise. The invaders were pushed back many times, retreating to their country of origin to lick their wounds and stockpile. They stopped bringing women with them. Eventually they took the long way, bribing, threatening and entreating the people of the land south of the Vaik to grant them passage from which to mount a ground assault.

But why, Jonathon wondered, did the people who had lived more or less peaceably with the Vaik enable the invaders? He swirled the amber liquid around his glass, tinkling the ice cubes. Greed, he supposed: the prospect of getting their hands on the fertile fields and a sea port. But he suspected something more than this. It sounded great on paper to be the fuck-thing of an army of horny Vaik twice a year, but what man really wanted to be reduced to an object of trade?

Or perhaps it had not been the work of the men, but the women. Were they resentful at giving up the strongest and most beautiful of their men to a season of pleasure? Did they want to see the Vaik reduced? Had they connived with the invaders to bring it about?

Both sides suffered heavy losses—thousands were slaughtered. Each side outdid the other in escalating acts of cruelty. The treaty that was finally drawn up saw the Vaik territory radically reduced. They lost their harbour and were walled in on three sides, the sea forming a natural barrier on the fourth. The treaty included a clause on what was rather primly called “biological guarantees,” whereby the Vaik were granted access to men and sperm. The details on this access were vague, but it evolved over many years into the present-day arrangement of national servicemen, supplicants and permanent residents.

Jonathon drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. Something was missing from the history. Some vital piece of information glossed over or elided. He’d read many a prospectus where words were piled up and arranged so as to hide a blankness. He himself had plastered over craters in due diligence with diversions and near-truths. For all its blood and mortality, the account the victors had written was too neat, too clean.

He thought, suddenly, of Clara. Alone in her box in the cold, damp earth. The idea of her spending her first night in the ground was unbearable. He considered the glass in his hand. He felt utterly, depressingly sober but knew he must be well over the limit.

He shut down his computer, the Vaik question unanswered. He found his greatcoat, scarf and gloves, and pulled a blanket from a hallway cupboard. The night air was cold but the rain had stopped. He swung his car from the driveway and drove carefully to the cemetery. The grounds were poorly lit, but he found Clara’s fresh-dug grave without difficulty. He spread the blanket beside her headstone and sat down. The air smelt of rain, grass and churned mud. He had the feeling that there were others, unseen, holding vigil through the trees. He wished he’d brought the whisky.

Was he a good man?

The Vaik were tricky to ask such a question. Did anyone fall clearly on one side of the ledger—and by whose accounting?

Jonathon paraded the people he knew through his head: his mother, father, colleagues, friends, brothers. They seemed good enough to him. They made generous donations to their favoured causes. They bundled last season’s clothing into charity bins and paid what the law required of them in taxes.

He didn’t think they were evil people . . . but then, one of his colleagues had violated the woman beside whose grave he now sat. Someone he said hello to in the kitchen. Maybe someone he’d had dinner with.

“Were you a good person, Clara?”

The dead woman kept her own counsel, and maintained it throughout the night.

Jonathon left the cemetery just before dawn. He was stiff, cold and groggy. He blasted the car heater, waiting for his animal heat to be restored before driving to his parents’ home. He let himself in quietly, not wanting to disturb the household.

His mother met him in the hallway. “Where were you? I was worried.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like hell. I’ll fix you some coffee.”

He followed her into the kitchen where his computer still sat, waiting for him to complete the supplicancy application. His mother heaped coffee into a glass jug and set the old-fashioned kettle she refused to part with on the stove.

“I’ve come to a decision,” he said.

His mother looked at him expectantly.

“I’m going to The Fortress for a year.”

Her expression barely changed. Only a slight thinning of the lips indicated that she’d heard him.

“Mother—the kettle.”

Its shrill whistle filled the space between them. She slowly turned and lifted the kettle from the stove then poured the boiling water into the jug.

“The Fortress,” she said dully.

“Yes, as a supplicant. I’ll be gone for twelve months.”

“I see.” She put a steaming mug of coffee in front of him, her nostrils flaring. “You don’t smell very good.”

“I’ll take a shower after my coffee.”

“You need to sleep.”

“Probably.”

“Hopefully then you will see how tasteless your little joke is.”

“I’m curious—why do you think I’m joking about this?”

“Why? Why? Because there are two types of people who go to The Fortress: hardcore sociopaths whom our own courts can’t deal with, and misguided hippies who think they can be bossed into enlightenment.”

Jonathon wanted to laugh in spite of himself. “I’ll pay you the compliment of having a neat turn of phrase, Mother.”

“I’d rather you paid me the compliment of being sensible.”

“I’m trying to save my marriage, to be a good father. That’s about as sensible as it gets, isn’t it?”

His mother’s eyes flashed. “Adalia’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?”

“She suggested it, yes, but—”

“You need to be very careful, Jonathon.”

“About what?”

“Oh, darling, can’t you see? Adalia gets you locked up and out of the way for a year. You come out of there expecting to play happy families and instead you find she’s claimed abandonment, you’ve forfeited your right to the child and all your assets have been liquidated.”

“You make Adalia sound like a conniving mastermind.”

“People do strange things when love goes wrong. All sorts of things get twisted, corrupted.”

Jonathon looked past his mother to the cold, indifferent morning that hulked behind the soft lights of the patio. “Do you remember the summer camp you used to send me to when I was a

“Lake Wykaita? Of course I do. What has that got to do with you going to The Fortress?”

“Did you know I hated that place? I don’t just mean I was occasionally bored or homesick, I mean I really fucking hated it.”

“No you didn’t, you—”

“Stop. Just stop. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to tell me how I felt about something. You’ve been doing that all my life—taking things and repackaging them so they make life more comfortable for you.”

“Fine.” She planted her feet wider apart and folded her arms across her chest. “Tell me then. Tell me all about why summer camp was a blight on your childhood and I’m to blame. Someone hit you? Abused you? Starved you?”

“No, it was nothing like that.”

“You’re damn right it was nothing like that. I vetted that place to within an inch of its life. If I thought for one second there was anything unsavoury about it I would’ve hauled you out and served a writ on them in the same visit.”

“People don’t have to be starved or hit to be miserable.”

“I know you struggled to adjust there sometimes. I’d call the camp leader a couple of times a day the first week just to see how you were getting on. When I came to pick you up you were always full of stories about your adventures, what you’d done, what one boy or another was up to. It just took you a little time to warm up to it.”

“There you go, Mother, you’re doing it again. Stitching up the narrative.”

She sniffed a little. Good god, was she about to cry? Jonathon was fascinated by the prospect.

“Yes, I encouraged you to go to summer camp. Yes, I chivvied you into it sometimes when you said you’d rather stay at home. I gave birth to three boys in seven years, Jonathon. Have you got the first clue what that’s like? While you’re so keen to forensically examine your miserable childhood, you might pause to reflect that you didn’t have a nanny. How many of the kids you grew up with can say the same? That was my choice. I wanted to be present for my children in a way my parents weren’t for me. In a way none of your friends’ parents were for them. So yes, I sent you to summer camp for four glorious weeks every year because I was fucking exhausted and needed a break. When you’re in The Fortress for the first year of your child’s life I look forward to learning all the things you’ve learnt about parenting.”

And with that she turned and left the room.

They barely spoke in the weeks leading up to Jonathon’s internment.

He spent the time reading all he could on Vaik culture and history. He became attentive to the traces of Vaik in his city, pausing before statues and plaques that marked treaties and truces. There was one statue that particularly intrigued him. He’d walked past it hundreds of times without giving it much thought; now, he studied it almost every day.

It was of a Vaik general—Lezah—who’d led the defence of the city two centuries before. (The Vaik and the city had long since established their accord, part of which involved a mutual defence pact.) General Lezah was presented in full warrior pose: a gun slung across one shoulder, her finger pointed at the marauding hordes. Yet something about the sculpture wasn’t quite right.

Some failure of proportion or execution made it an oddity.

It wasn’t until Jonathon was at The Fortress that he realised the sculptor had been in conflict with his creation. Valour and power and breasts had unmanned him. He had been commissioned to honour the Vaik, but could not do so without making himself smaller. Another thing Jonathon realised: General Lezah looked like his mother.

He’d answered “yes” on the form.

The second storm front barrelled across the sky, operatic in silver and indigo. The clouds massed and detached at such speed the universe seemed to be forming around Jonathon. Trees bent over themselves, sheaving leaves that blurred past him. The masjythra cleaved so tightly it pinched his eyebrows and chest hair. He huddled against the wall, feeling his way inch by inch, willing himself towards the sentry post he knew was there but could no longer see. His impulses had concentrated to a single point: forward. Even so, the wave kept revealing its kill then snatching it down, down to the grey, cold seabed.

The wind turned on itself and was suddenly behind him. He used it as a fist at his lower back. Sometimes he found it easier to spin along the wall, shoulder by shoulder, fists at his sides, than to try walking. He dervished in this way, taking skin off his nose and hands as he flew against the rough bricks.

He was lucky to notice the grey smudge that moved haltingly across the plain at right angles to him. His first thought was that it might be a vehicle, a small agricultural cart or trolley. But it was flailing and erratic and seemed to have sighted him. His stomach iced over at the thought of a Vaik spirit weaving through the storm in search of unsheltered men.

It raised a hand and waved it manically. Jonathon peeled the masjythra from his head and shielded his eyes from the rain with his hands. The smudge clarified into Daidd, his masjythra now shimmering, now dull, in the storm. Jonathon jumped up and down in answer, waving his own arms about. He used the wall as a launching pad into the flooded plain, splashing in his cloddish boots towards Daidd.

Even taking the ferocity of the storm into account, Daidd moved strangely. At first Jonathon thought he was injured. Then he realised that he half-carried, half-dragged something—someone—

Ulait! Jonathon’s heart lurched with joy and relief.

Daidd reached out for him with his free hand; the other was clutched around Ulait’s waist. As Daidd wilted against him in exhaustion, Jonathon reached around her back. Her body was slack, but she was conscious.

“Careful,” Daidd yelled above the storm. “She’s hurt.”

Ulait smiled weakly. Her skin was ashen and her lips blanched white. Jonathon drew her closer, then bundled her into his arms. “Easy,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Daidd positioned himself behind Jonathon, his shoulder pressed into his back to keep them from blowing off course. Although Ulait was heavy, Jonathon found it almost easier walking diagonally into the storm with the extra ballast. They were only metres from the sentry post but progress was hard won and came in inches. Finally, the door was visible ahead of them.

Jonathon huddled under the eaves, hugging Ulait to him, as Daidd banged his fists on the sentry door. They waited. No one came. Daidd banged again.

Jonathon leant towards him and yelled, “Perhaps this post is inactive. We might have to move further down.” How would Ulait manage the two, perhaps three kilometres?

She lifted her head weakly from his shoulder and looked up. “No. This post is active. Try again.”

Daidd raised his fist to the door when it opened. A woman’s head emerged. She looked in silent astonishment at the three of them, as if disbelieving what she saw.

Then she flung the door open and rushed to Ulait, cupped her face in her hands, and kissed the girl’s forehead. “Inside. Quickly.” The woman assumed control of Ulait, guiding her into the post. Daidd and Jonathon followed. “Close and bar the door,” the woman instructed.

Jonathon shut it against the storm and lowered the latch, then turned and leant against it. The rectangular room he found himself in was spare and dark, but it was warm. An open fire burned in a stone hearth at the far end.

The Vaik deposited Ulait into a chair near the fire and mopped at her hair and face with a cloth. “Come. Warm yourselves.”

Daidd and Jonathon moved gratefully to stand with their backs to the fire as the Vaik attended to Ulait. Their masjythras almost sighed against the heat, releasing clouds of steam, swathing them in fog.

“Where does it hurt, child?” the Vaik asked.

“My ankle. I fell.”

The Vaik carefully removed Ulait’s boots and socks to reveal an ankle twice its normal size and purple like a norsling. The Vaik clucked her tongue and ran her hands over Ulait’s foot and calf. “How came you to be outside in the storm?”

“It was an accident. I was following the olöcks. I wanted to see where they went when the storms came. I realised I wouldn’t make it back before the sestyatesh so I decided to take shelter. I had some food with me and I found a good spot to wait it out. I got a fire going and was quite snug. Then I found Daidd.”

“What do you mean?”

“I looked out during the eye and saw him on the plain. You can imagine my shock that a man would be out in the storm. He shouldn’t have been there. I thought he must be lost. So I set off after him. I thought we’d both shelter in case there was a second front. But the visibility was so poor I fell in this sort of a ravine and hurt my ankle. We decided to make for the sentry post.” Ulait paused, and closed her eyes. Her skin was waxy with pain. “I think I’ve broken my ankle.”

The Vaik clucked her tongue. “Yes. This will need to be set. You need mistaelnet. Here.” She held out the towel to Jonathon. “We need to get her warm and dry.”

He wrapped the towel around Ulait’s head and gently massaged her scalp. She felt hot. She looked up at him, her eyes glazed. Beads of sweat ran along her upper lip and hairline.

“We swam under the boats,” she mumbled. “Fish like rainbows. Knives in our mouths.”

“Shoosh, shoosh now,” Jonathon crooned.

Opposite the fireplace was a kitchen area where the Vaik pulled jars from cupboards and spooned seeds and pods into a mortar. In the opposite corner was a bed, neatly made and heaped with cushions and pillows. Crude shelves along the walls held books and candles. The other corner was taken up by a wooden ladder lashed to the wall by tough leather straps; it disappeared into the ceiling and the post at the top of the wall.

Jonathon dabbed the towel over Ulait’s neck and arms.

“I poured the verrglet myself,” she muttered. “I wore red silk.”

He recognised the word picture she was painting and blushed red, the heat rising all the way to his scalp. “Hush now,” he said.

The Vaik drew up a low stool and sat next to Ulait, who occupied the only comfortable chair in the room. “Open up for me. That’s the girl.” The Vaik spooned a green paste—mistaelnet—into Ulait’s mouth, then held a glass of water to her lips. “Swallow it down for me. I know it tastes bad.”

Ulait’s face puckered in distaste. She shook her head to avoid another spoonful.

“Come on, one more for me.”

But Ulait pressed her lips tight shut and craned her head away. “Hold her head for me,” the Vaik instructed Jonathon. Reluctantly, he kept Ulait’s damp head trapped in his hands until she was still. The Vaik knuckled a point near where her ear met her jawbone, forcing her mouth open, then dropped a blob of the green paste on her tongue and pressed her mouth shut. Ulait made a half-strangled sound and screwed up her eyes and cheeks.

“Open your mouth for me.”

Ulait opened her mouth, revealing that she’d swallowed the mistaelnet. “Good girl.” The Vaik stroked her cheek, then held the water glass to her mouth again. “A few sips for me . . . a few more . . . there. You’ll start to feel better very soon.”

The Vaik manoeuvred Ulait’s chair closer to the fire. Steam rose from her clothes in ghostly white waves then dissolved into the darkness.

“Self dissolving to nothing,” Jonathon murmured.

Daidd looked at him questioningly.

“The isvestyii—” Jonathon began, but the Vaik shot him a warning look.

“This is not the time or the place for that.” She turned to Daidd. “Do you know how to make a plaster to set Ulait’s foot?”

Daidd nodded.

“You’ll find the materials in the kitchen. There are bandages in the cupboard below the sink. There’s hot water in the pot above the fire.” Daidd moved to the kitchen and began preparing the plaster. The Vaik bent towards Ulait’s foot and examined it closely. Softly, so as not to be heard by Daidd, she said, “He is dead?”

Jonathon nodded. “I found him by the low point in the wall, near the sea. He was—”

The Vaik shook her head. “It’s finished now.”

“But I want to tell you, Mistress,” Jonathon whispered. “I need to tell you.”

“It’s for you alone.”

Daidd handed the wet plaster and the bandages to the Vaik, and she deftly layered them from Ulait’s toes to her ankle.

Ulait barely stirred as the mistaelnet took effect. The first flush of colour returned to her cheeks and her lips. Jonathon was mesmerised by the steam leaving her body and drifting to the fire. He felt there was a message in it for him, but he couldn’t decode it. Without warning he pitched forward towards Ulait’s chair as a wave of exhaustion tackled him.

“Come,” said the Vaik, “you need to sit. And eat. You both must be starving. Can you finish this?” She left Daidd to bind Ulait’s foot and picked up a chair from across the room, setting it down next to Ulait by the fire. “Come. Sit yourself. Your name?”

“Jonathon Bridge.”

“You are a supplicant?”

“Yes.”

“How long is your tenure?”

“One year.”

“Of which you have served?”

“About ten months. I think.”

Daidd, she seemed to know already.

The fire flickered and glowed, casting ghostly shadows on the walls. Jonathon’s eyelids twitched with fatigue. The storm still raged, but the fall of the rain on the thick stone walls was almost homely, comforting. Daidd finished binding Ulait’s foot then knelt by Jonathon and pulled his boots off. He held a pitcher of water to Jonathon’s lips. Until it hit his tongue, Jonathon had no idea how furiously thirsty he was. He gulped it down.

“Easy, easy,” cautioned Daidd. “You’ll make yourself sick.” Jonathon fell back in his chair and reached for Ulait’s hand. The mistaelnet had broken her fever and her hand felt cool in his. The Vaik returned with a tray of food that she placed on a rough wooden box. “It’s not much, I’m afraid. The storm has affected our supply lines.”

“We have supplies,” Daidd said. “At least Jonathon does. I lost my pack somewhere.”

It took Jonathon a moment to comprehend, but he was still carrying the pack on his back. He stood up and sloughed it off, handing it to her, and she thanked him.

A few moments later she gave Jonathon a plate of dried fruit, sausage, cheese and chewy brown bread. There was also a nutty paste that he guessed to be a high-calorie invention of the Vaik. He could almost feel it doubling the marrow in his bones. Sitting before the crackling fire, he felt euphoric: the kind of lazy, sleepy euphoria he remembered from the strong headache tablets he’d pilfered from his mother’s bathroom cabinet when he was in his teens. He wavered between asleep and awake as he ferried the food to his mouth. The mallow root sweet on his tongue, the cheese strong and bitey. He had half an idea to climb the ladder to the Aeraevest to watch the storm spending itself out to sea, but the chair was like a warm, loving hand that embraced him. He set the idea down by his side and thought of it no more as he drifted into sleep.

He woke wrapped in the same peace that had transported him to sleep. The fire had burnt low. The charred logs flared red when the wind whistled down the chimney. The ferocity was gone from the storm, but still the rain came down. Ulait remained asleep in the chair beside him, her head tucked on her shoulder, her mouth slightly ajar. In sleep she looked a child still; her eyelids full, her skin poreless. Her fringe had dried in sticky triangles against her forehead. Across the room, Daidd and the Vaik shared her bed. Jonathon wanted to freeze the moment, to hold it perfect and unchanged for a while yet. He feared Ulait’s wakefulness. Her anger.

There was a scattering sound as drops of rain flew down the chimney, hissing at the logs. Ulait stirred and opened her eyes. She looked at the fire, then turned her gaze towards Jonathon.

“Good morning, Mistress.”

She yawned, pink-mouthed like a kitten. “Good morning.”

“We’re in a sentry post along the perimeter wall. You set out after Daidd and fell and hurt yourself.”

She nodded. “I remember. How did you come to be here, Jonathon Bridge?”

“I set out after you. Me, Daidd, Mandalay, we all took different routes.”

Ulait frowned. “A supplicant and Daidd authorised to look for me in the middle of a sestyatesh? That doesn’t make sense.” She wrinkled her brow, then drew the blankets tighter across her shoulders.

The Vaik hailed Ulait from across the room. “How are you feeling, darling girl?”

“Okay, I think.” She wriggled her toes, the only part of her foot not encased in plaster. “My foot hurts a bit. It’s throbbing.”

“It will hurt for a few days yet. Stay here again tonight, then we’ll get you home tomorrow.”

She threw back her covers, stood up and stretched. She was completely naked, and rather short for a Vaik. Climbing up and down the ladder to the Aeraevest had roped her quadriceps and calves into thick knots of muscle. She drew her yellow hair into a rough ponytail on top of her head, revealing sculpted biceps. Her skin was dark and glossy. Jonathon looked at her admiringly. She dropped a silky green gown over her head, then washed her hands and face in a bowl of water.

Daidd too was naked, his long penis hanging slackly against his thigh. Jonathon was slightly awed by the man who had become his friend. Last night he’d been so exhausted in mind and body he would have been incapable of satisfying any Vaik commands, probably earning himself another term in the subterranean prison. Had Daidd nobly assumed the task, recognising Jonathon’s incapacity? Or had the Vaik not thought of Jonathon when Daidd was in the room? Was Daidd superhuman?

The Vaik danced merrily across the room and placed her palm on Ulait’s forehead. “You’re still a bit warm, but you’re doing well. Eat something, then you’ll need another dose of mistaelnet.”

Daidd dressed in his masjythra then bent to tend the fire. His waxy profile and milky eye were turned towards Jonathon and Ulait as he coaxed flames from fresh logs and kindling. “Daidd, what happened to your face?” said Ulait.

Daidd didn’t pause in his task as he answered. “I was burnt with acid.”

“Was it an accident?”

“No, Ulait”—Jonathon noticed that she had given Daidd permission to use her name—“it was a punishment. I wronged a woman, and she was entitled to Vaik justice.”

“She chose acid over having you declared isvestyii?”

“Yes.”

“Did she pour it on you?”

“Yes.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It was agony,” he said simply.

Jonathon was shocked. How could his gentle, patient friend have done something so terrible, so brutal to warrant such punishment? To potentially be declared isvestyii?

Daidd turned from the fire, replenished now, and focused his good eye on Jonathon. He read Jonathon’s expression. “The punishment was just.”

“Come,” said the Vaik. “Let’s check the Aeraevest.” She rearranged the blankets around Ulait. “You will be all right for a few minutes, darling?”

“Of course.”

The Vaik nodded towards the ladder near the bed. Daidd ascended first; Jonathon followed. He climbed towards the open air moving above them. He stepped out onto a narrow landing and gripped the railing. His masjythra snaked around him, closing out the cold. The sea—calmer now but still in the after-burn of yesterday’s fury—circled him. There was nothing between the Aeraevest and the grey-blue line of the horizon. He tried to imagine the time when flotillas had sped across that line to capture The Fortress. Tried to imagine the omnipresent state of siege and vigilance that the Vaik must have felt, but mostly he just felt small. Small and insignificant in the grey-blue vastness. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, exactly.

The Vaik climbed over the railing and sprang onto the roof. Jonathon heard her clunking above him and watched the debris she tossed over the side fall into the ocean. He thought of the body of the isvestyii suspended in that same ocean. Nothing. Nothingness.

“Did you ever see anything like this?” he asked Daidd.

Daidd smiled. “I know this vista like the back of my hand. Better.”

“How?”

“I spent seven years in an Aeraevest much like this one, but closer to The Dryans. Even more remote. Even now when I close my eyes at night I see the ocean.”

“I’ve worked beside you almost every day for nearly a year and I know virtually nothing about you.”

“You know why I’m here and why I stay. Everything else is just a footnote.”

“Mandalay isn’t—can’t be—yours. Exclusively. Can’t be . . . I’m struggling for the right words . . . wedded to you. Nor you to her. That must hurt. Badly.”

“You’ve gotten better at framing questions as statements.” Another flurry of debris flew past them to the water. “Yes, I hurt. But I own that pain. I honour it.”

The Vaik swung back onto the landing and picked stray leaves from her dress. “There’s some damage. Some holes that will need to be tarred over. Nothing too dramatic, though.” She placed a fond hand on one of the posts. “You’ve done well. Sound and true.” She opened a strongbox tucked into a corner and removed some fishing pots. She dropped three of them carefully into the sea then secured them on hooks. “With any luck we’ll have fish for supper.”

The three of them stood there for a few moments, staring out across the dark ocean.

Evening came and there were, indeed, fish in the pots. The Vaik skinned and filleted the fish and dropped their white flesh into a pot hanging above the fire. A strong smell of herbs suffused the space, making Jonathon slightly light-headed. Ulait had dozed for most of the day, still tired after walking so far on her injured foot and lethargic under the sway of the mistaelnet. Jonathon surreptitiously watched the Vaik as she went about preparing the meal. She exuded an air of quiet capability. From her colouring and bearing, Jonathon assumed she had been born and bred at The Fortress: a woman whose birthright included power and belonging. He realised he envied her.

They ate the fish stew out of wooden bowls and sopped up the juice with chewy, slightly bitter bread. They didn’t talk much, but the silence was companionable. The fire flickered brighter as the evening set in. Daidd brewed tea for them all and spooned another dose of mistaelnet to Ulait. Soon, she was dozing. The Vaik collected up their plates and cups and deposited them in the kitchen area. She returned to the fire with a large bowl of water.

“Come.” She gestured to Daidd and Jonathon. They stood in the middle of the room as she dipped her elbow into the water. Satisfied with its temperature, she dropped a cloth into the water. “Take off your masjythra.” Jonathon did as he was bid, dropping the garment onto the floor beside him. “Bend a little lower.” He dipped his face towards her and she gently ran the cloth over his face and neck. It was warm and smelt like one of the flowers from the shaenet. The Vaik stood behind him and sponged his shoulders. A drip of water ran down the furrow in his back and into the crease of his buttocks, making him shudder. The Vaik dipped the cloth into the bowl again and cleansed his arms and torso. Her ministrations were gentle and thorough.

When she had finished with Jonathon she brought a fresh bowl of water and bathed Daidd. She took special care around the puckered, scarred skin on his face, neck and pectoral, at one point leaving a soft kiss on the damaged tissue before moving her sponge to his stirring penis. When he was clean she lay down on her bed, her head propped up on her hand, looking at the two of them. Her instruction was brief, polite: “Please,” followed by a wave of the hand indicating they had the floor.

Jonathon and Daidd looked at each other in the flickering shadows. Jonathon was not revolted by the idea of touching Daidd. He respected him, had come to feel admiration for him even if there was much he didn’t know about his history. Nor was Daidd’s body alien to him. Having bathed with him almost every day since he arrived at The Fortress there was only his own and Adalia’s bodies that be knew better. What Jonathon felt was physically inept. The Vaik may as well have asked him to perform a lyrical dance piece. He didn’t know the steps, and didn’t know how to imagine himself into them. There had been furtive experiences with boys at Lake Wykaita, but they’d come about after hot-breathed leering at big-busted women in porn magazines—a kind of hydraulic release that used whatever method was at hand. This Vaik wanted a spectacle, a performance.

Daidd stepped towards Jonathon and placed his large hand around the back of his neck, drawing him closer. His mouth opened under the pressure of Daidd’s and he flickered his tongue tentatively in the other man’s mouth.

Jonathon closed his eyes and tried to imagine that Daidd was a woman, but the evidence was too contrary to enliven the fantasy. The sheer bulk of Daidd, the musky smell of him evident even under the Vaik tincture, the sensation of butting rather than melding stomachs and hips permitted no conclusion other than that Daidd was a man. Jonathon thought of Laliya, how powerfully attracted to her he had been from first sight before learning that she was once electii. Mandalay had grabbed his penis, threatened to tear it from his body with her teeth to prove that womanhood was not an absence, a lacuna.

“Relax,” Daidd whispered into his ear. “Clear your mind. Don’t think about anything.”

Jonathon tried to vacate his mind but all it left was the strange reality of Daidd’s hand gripped behind his neck, the rough tongue in his mouth, the fingers moving down towards his buttocks. He opened his eyes and looked at the Vaik. She remained propped up on the bed, watching them intently. If only she would remove her dress: give Jonathon the physical stimulus of her lithe legs, the narrow vortex of her waist, her proud breasts, that sweep of impossibly blonde hair. But she didn’t.

There was a shuffling noise behind them as Ulait stirred in her sleep. He worried about the girl waking up to the sight of two men making love, then realised it would be neither prurient nor strange to her. There had never been any evidence of a physical relationship between his parents when he was growing up. He had assumed their sex life was effectively over, but perhaps they’d simply taken care to hide it from him and his brothers. He tried to imagine the scene through Ulait’s eyes; to be a teenager for whom sexual expression was no more mysterious than seasons passing and new crops being sown in the soil.

He allowed an experimental hand to drift along Daidd’s shoulders and torso. He felt the puckered skin and winced slightly at the thought of the pain the acid must have caused. He willed his hand further, to the trail of wiry hairs between Daidd’s belly button and his pubic bone. He flattened his hand against the taut plane of Daidd’s belly. It was like and unlike touching himself. Familiar yet strange.

Daidd pulled him down onto the threadbare rug. Jonathon felt its roughness on his skin as Daidd stretched himself out on top of him, a crush against his rib cage. Was this what Adalia felt under his weight? Daidd found his mouth again. Jonathon ran his hand down the furrow of Daidd’s back and across the upturned flank of his bottom. The curves were not unlike a woman’s, and Jonathon felt a momentary reprieve of familiarity. But the curves were hairy, and not the soft downy fur of golden hairs on Adalia’s body, but wiry.

Jonathon looked again towards the Vaik. Perhaps she intended to join them at some point. But still she reclined on the bed, clothed and watching.

Daidd’s breath was hot against his neck. A hand closed on his penis and began to gently massage it. He sucked in his breath as the blood ran to his cock, an involuntary movement like a tide. Daidd coaxed him to a full erection, then planted a line of kisses along his chest towards his groin. He sucked in his breath again as Daidd’s hot mouth closed over him. The gasp was one of surprised pleasure as sensation and thought collided: a man is sucking my dick.

The Vaik stirred and Jonathon felt her concentration double. She was enjoying this. The thought gave him pleasure. He grasped Daidd’s hair between his fingers and held him against his groin. Daidd held Jonathon tightly around the base of his cock with his thumb and forefinger, then pressed the head of his penis to the roof of his mouth and moved up and down the shaft, licking him. Daidd’s touch was expert; a polymorphous master in the art of pleasure. The Vaik changed her position slightly to see better, and Jonathon was overcome by his climax. He shuddered against the floor and made an inarticulate strangling sound.

“That was lovely,” said the Vaik.

Daidd sat up and wiped his mouth. The Vaik offered him a mug of water, which he accepted.

“Was that your first time with a man?” she asked Jonathon.

“Yes,” he said somewhat breathlessly.

“I love watching men,” she said. “They become so beautiful here at The Fortress. All earth and muscle and concentrated energy.” She rose from the bed and Jonathon expected her to join them. Instead she walked towards the kitchen cabinets and took a jar from a shelf, paused to check on Ulait, who was sleeping soundly, then returned.

“Here.” She handed the jar to Daidd. He removed the lid and dipped his finger inside. It emerged shiny and redolent. The scent was familiar, but Jonathon could not immediately place it. Daidd ran the oil along the length of his penis.

He raised his eyes to meet Jonathon’s. His expression was apologetic. “Roll over, Jonathon.”

The smell. He remembered. When he’d first entered The Fortress, the electii had conducted a cavity search. The slap and stretch of the glove exploded in Jonathon’s ear canal.

He had never experienced anal sex. Once, he and Adalia had purchased a vibrator. “I am so fucking you up the arse with this!” she had said gleefully. They’d tried, but his anus was having none of it, and they’d descended into a fit of giggles, silver lolly wrappers floating from the bed. It had become a running joke between them. Whenever Jonathon had done something to annoy Adalia, she had grabbed a salt shaker or a candle—anything vaguely phallic within reach—made a buzzing noise and directed it at his bum.

Jonathon rolled over, feeling the rough weave of the rug scratch his belly. Daidd began massaging his lower back and buttocks with the oil. His thumbs came closer and closer to the entrance to Jonathon’s body, and with each concentric circle Jonathon tensed up. He did not want this. He profoundly did not want this. Yet this would happen. He was underground again, two impossible worlds colliding.

Daidd ceased kneading his buttocks and laid himself over Jonathon’s back. Daidd’s penis pressed against the crevice between his butt cheeks. Daidd gently entered Jonathon’s body.

“Breathe, Jonathon. You need to breathe.”

He closed his hands over Jonathon’s and was still. Jonathon breathed in and out as Daidd had instructed him, trying to relax. Jonathon knew that Daidd would not intentionally hurt him, but he was sick with panic. If he tried to fight Daidd off, he would anger the Vaik and expose himself to further pain. If he tried to fight Daidd off, it would be futile; Daidd had the advantage in height and power. If he tried to fight Daidd off, it would only serve to prove how powerless he was.

Jonathon pressed his forehead against the rug and closed his eyes as Daidd entered him a little more. It hurt and it was strange and it was also . . . good. He bucked involuntarily, his body responding. That his body would do this, produce pleasure in the midst of his fear and confusion, seemed traitorous. Tears leaked from his eyelids. His body had robbed him of the certainty of victimhood. He had a sudden, unprecedented urge to pray but did not know how, or to whom. Instead, he ran Clara’s name through his mind, over and over again. He had never doubted that what had happened to her was awful, but until this moment he hadn’t understood how self-reproach and confusion did the violator’s work for them.

It was over. Daidd eased himself off and sat beside him. Jonathon didn’t move. He simply lay there, tense and rigid, waiting for further commands from the Vaik. “Jonathon,” Daidd whispered. “She’s asleep.”

Jonathon looked up. The Vaik’s head was on her outstretched arm, her mouth slightly ajar, her chest rising and falling. Jonathon felt a surge of fury. In his mind’s eye he saw himself belting her across the face with an open palm, squeezing her bulging throat till her eyes popped. He lay on the rug, unmoving.

“Are you hurt?” Daidd asked tenderly.

“I don’t think so.”

“Would you like some water?”

“No. Thank you.”

Jonathon didn’t know what to do, where to look. He felt ashamed. He closed his eyes. He thought about asking Daidd to fetch him some of Ulait’s mistaelnet paste, but didn’t trust himself to speak. He would cry, and this seemed a terrible thing. The final debasement.

Daidd began to talk. He spoke in a low voice, the sort of voice you would use to coax an injured animal towards shelter. Jonathon lay there, his face pressed against the scratchy rug, his heart aflame, and after a while he began to listen.

Daidd’s family were quite well-to-do—not establishment like the Bridges, but three or four generations out of The Dryans. Daidd’s father was a municipal councillor, his mother an art teacher. When Daidd was growing up his father was engaged in an endless, tortuous battle with banal things. Zoning and by-laws and fire hydrants. His mother’s nails were always smudged with paint and she collected glass jars from the neighbours to wash paintbrushes in. These were the things Daidd remembered. It had been a long time since he’d had any contact with his parents.

Daidd met Naomi at university. He had taken his usual seat in the semicircular lecture theatre—eight rows back and slightly left of the middle—when he saw her. She sat forward of him in the extreme curve of the semicircle near the door, so he had a clear view of her profile. In the intensely stratified world of university life in which he had struggled to find a firm footing she was just so . . . normal. Nice and normal.

Her hair was long and dark. She pulled it loosely back from her face and tied it with a purple ribbon. Her cardigan was wheat-coloured, soft and feminine. Daidd felt that he might reach out and touch it, pluck the nodules of fluff from her shoulder and drop them to the floor. She unzipped her bag and removed a spiral notebook and two pens: one black, one red. How his heart leapt at that detail. It meant she was ordered, like him. He used the black ink for the things he understood, having already gleaned them from the pre-reading, and red for the things he would follow up on later in the science library.

She placed her bag beneath her seat, squared her chair to the front, then turned and surveyed the lecture theatre. She had a high, wide forehead where the soft down of her hair collected at her temples. A small, snub nose with a light spray of freckles across the top. Dark, almond-shaped eyes and small, white, regular teeth. Daidd had the stunning realisation that time, which he had always considered uncompromisingly linear, ran on a multitude of tracks at different speeds. He had proceeded in an orderly fashion to this moment, which stretched longer than moments do, and in deep, ineffable silence. Time would run differently when the moment finally tapered, and in a different channel.

It was love. It had to be.

Later, Daidd would look over the notes he had made in that lecture—foundations of quantum mechanics—and marvel at them. He had no memory of anything the lecturer had said. No memory of writing anything down. Yet there were the notes in his square, legible hand: black ink for what was known, red for what was not.

Daidd was wholly unprepared for the physicality of love. It made him seasick and put him off his food so that he was six kilos lighter by semester’s end. The mere sight of her constricted his throat and dumped sweat from his armpits so that his shirts were always damp and, frankly, stank.

That love was such a time-thief stunned him. He’d sit down to his books, determined to brush up on formulas and theorems, only to realise that half an hour had gone by in which he’d done nothing more productive than imagine conversations with her. In some of these conversations he was arch and debonair, in others shy and tender.

Sometimes, before an exam or when an assignment was due, he’d feel a flash of irritation at the girl for consuming him so entirely. His future was by no means assured. He didn’t have a family name to rely on so he needed a good degree and glowing references from his tutors.

Once, exasperated at his inability to concentrate, he yelled at her image to go away. His mother knocked at the door of his room, poked her head around it and asked if he was all right. She had globs of grey paint on her forehead.

“I’m fine,” he assured her, “just struggling with this paper.”

His mother smiled. “You work too hard. Try not to take it too seriously.” He knew this was something she could afford to say precisely because he did take it seriously.

The girl colonised his dreams, his airways, the tubes of his vas deferens. Imagine, he thought, how unbearable unrequited love would be. As it was, this was barely tolerable.

Daidd learnt her name the next term when they were allocated to the same tutorial group. Naomi. Her name was Naomi. Daidd took to scribbling it on the corners of his lecture pads. He twinned it with his own name. Naomi and Daidd. Daidd and Naomi.

Being in tutorials with her created an atmospheric pressure that could be unbearable. Their proximity caused a strange friction, like a scientific anomaly he couldn’t yet explain. Too much red ink on the page. Like those moments when the tutor would hand back their assignments and Naomi would score better than him. Quite considerably better. He watched the coy drop of her head as she read the commendation inked on her title page. How, he wondered, had she focused her concentration like that; unshackled herself from the time-theft that was ravaging him? It was a question that made the lining of his stomach freeze.

It wasn’t just the marks, either. Sometimes, after class, he and Naomi would go for a coffee in the cafeteria and three or four of the other students would tag along. One of them, a boy named Marek who wore a green trench coat and had long, foppish hair, offered her a cigarette. To Daidd’s astonishment, Naomi accepted it. Marek leant over and offered her a light. She cupped the flame in her hands and inhaled.

“I didn’t know you smoked.” Daidd spoke so abrasively, so accusingly, that the table stopped. He laughed to break the tension. “Sorry, I’m a reformed smoker,” he lied. “We’re incorrigible.” The table laughed with him, glad to have a satisfactory explanation, but still Naomi had given him a look that unsettled him. It was a wary, hesitant look as if she’d caught the first whiff of an incipient danger.

Daidd wanted to establish himself in a job before they married, but he felt that the right thing to do would be to announce their engagement shortly after graduation. Nothing too big and frilly. Just a few friends and family, champagne, a string quartet, speeches that were warm, witty and short. “Intimate and elegant” was how he thought of it, a riposte to the mortifying, exclusionary proms and dances of his high-school years. Intimate and elegant. He could see the font in which this would be printed on the invitations.

Not that he would object if Naomi wanted to do things differently. Girls, he knew, had firm and inflexible views on weddings and suchlike. He pictured himself good-naturedly humouring her in all the particularities of the planning. Still, he liked to scroll the “intimate and elegant” across his mind’s eye. His desire to simultaneously control and relinquish the engagement became twinned with a certain preening satisfaction he felt about resisting the “sowing of his wild oats.” This was another phrase he pictured in a very particular font on the flyleaf of his inner eye. Not that he wasn’t tempted sometimes. Not that he didn’t consider it might even be for the best, in the long term, if he did. He jumped over the glaring realities of this sowing—the lack of offers, the singular and unwavering disinterest girls before Naomi had always shown in him—and repackaged it as an offering. He would resist, and give himself pure and unhandled to Naomi, a noble sign of his devotion and self-sacrifice.

Intimate and elegant Sow his wild oats

The depth of his investment in the fantasy made what came later even more of a shock.

It was a Thursday, Daidd told Jonathon, a month out from final exams, and everyone was feeling the pressure. The mood in the lab was tense and claustrophobic, a feeling that the most threadbare triviality would push someone into tantrum and tears. Daidd was trying to concentrate on the beaker in front of him, his notes and the promptings of his lab partner. But he felt a strange suspicion, mounting to conviction, that signals of secret understanding were passing between Naomi and her lab partner, the same boy who had given her the cigarette—Marek. They didn’t say much to each other, in fact they were the least verbal of any of the partners in the lab. The myriad tasks of the experiment were divvied up between them by way of nods, half-smiles, hand semaphore and once a light bumping of shoulders. Gestures of collusion. The sort of intimacy, like his and Naomi’s, that operated on a higher plane than words. Was Naomi two-timing him?

Intimate and elegant

Sow his wild oats

Intimate and elegant

Sow his wild oats

Daidd’s beaker dropped, smashed and splattered alkaline solution over his shoes and onto the floor. He looked at his wet sneakers, the puddle, the glass fragments—but it took him a moment to piece together the cause and effect. He had dropped the beaker. The beaker had smashed. His shoes were wet . . . A throat-tickling, sulphurous smell permeated the air.

The tutor rushed over and placed his hand on Daidd’s shoulder. “Daidd. You’ve gone completely white. Are you all right? What happened?”

Daidd didn’t reply; he was intent on the broken beaker, trying to figure out how it had come to be in pieces on the floor.

“Come outside. Come get some air.” The tutor led him out of the room, leaving the door propped open to air it out. He held up his hand to the group, indicating he’d be five minutes. “Don’t anyone touch the glass, okay? I’ll worry about that when I get back.” He gently pushed Daidd along the corridor towards the swinging doors of the building. Daidd could tell that the tutor was genuinely alarmed. Daidd felt older by the second; when they reached the front doors, he thought, he might well be an old man.

Once they emerged onto the lip of the always fresh-cut oval, Daidd sank to his knees and hands before retching a thin stream of green bile onto the close-cropped grass. His tutor rubbed his shoulderblades encouragingly and said something about going for medical help if Daidd needed it. Daidd’s thoughts divided into distinct bubbles that jostled against one another, sometimes merging and sometimes bouncing apart. It couldn’t be. I’m imagining it. I’ll kill her. I’m feverish, hallucinating. I’ll kill him. Flings aren’t insurmountable. Pre-wedding jitters. Sauce for the goose. I’ll kill myself.

Pieces of his flesh went skipping off after his thoughts. He felt himself disintegrating, imagined the university’s maintenance staff collecting clumps of his hair, a bloodied ear, his still-beating heart from the oval.

He concentrated his will on one thought, surely the correct thought, and in so doing began to draw the pieces of himself back together. He had imagined it, conjured his deepest fear and given it life, aided and abetted by the fatigue and stress that came with exams. He repeated the thought to himself over and over, until the pieces stirred, twitched and rolled back to Daidd like iron filings to a magnet. He began to feel the coarse grass under his hands, smell the sharp chlorophyll, feel the sun on the back of his neck. He collapsed onto his stomach and then rolled over onto his back, his arm slung across his eyes to keep the sun out.

“I’m all right,” he managed after a moment.

“What happened?” the tutor asked.

“I felt sick all of a sudden. It’s gone now.”

“I need to get back. Will you be all right for a minute? I’ll send someone out with water.”

Daidd nodded.

When he saw Naomi emerge from the doors with a glass, the relief was an opiate flooding his body, bursting a clear wall that had stood between him and a hitherto unrealised, unknown realm of bliss. Of course she had come to check on him. Of course she was concerned. What a fool he was. He dashed the tears from his eyes, embarrassed, and pulled himself up to a sitting position. Later (years later and in a different body in a different country) he realised that the tutor had sent Naomi out because she was the only girl in the lab.

“Hey, Daidd,” she said as she dropped to the grass beside him. “Sorry you’re not well. Do you want some water?”

He took it from her, his hand trembling. Their fingertips brushed as they exchanged the glass, kicking the opiate in his blood even higher and bucketing the tears from his eyes.

She looked at him with concern. “It’s the stress, isn’t it? It’s getting to everyone. I think we’re all on the verge of a major freak-out. Drink some water and take deep breaths.”

He did as she suggested. He drank a few mouthfuls, wedged the glass into a tuft of grass and brushed the tears from his eyes again. He smiled at her then opened his mouth to tell her of the green serpent that he’d conjured from sleeplessness and worry, when the lab class poured out of the building.

Marek came bounding towards them and dropped down beside Naomi, throwing two backpacks onto the ground. “They let us go early to clean up and air out the room. Sorry you’re crook, Daidd, but man I’m seriously grateful you got us out of there. That was one dull tute.” And then he leant over and kissed Naomi softly on the lips, raised a hand to brush back some hair that had come loose from her ponytail and said, “Ready to go, babe?”

She nodded. “You’ll be okay, Daidd?” She stood up, took the backpack that Marek had retrieved for her, reattached it to her back, gave Daidd a wave and walked off towards the car park, hand in hand with the green-jacketed cigarette boy.

During the trial Daidd’s lawyer described what happened next as a period of temporary insanity. Daidd remembered little of it. What he did remember came to him in flashes, unexpectedly, as though he was plucked out of time and dropped into a cinema where events rolled randomly and out of sequence.

He was labouring against Goosen’s Trial during the first season he spent in The Fortress gardens when the warning on the label came to him, rising up from the field like a vengeful ghost. It levitated for him to read: the red label, the white lettering, the skull-and-crossbones symbol. “Dangerous chemical. To be used under supervision. Not to be removed from the lab.” He didn’t remember stealing it. Didn’t remember throwing it at Naomi, didn’t remember her screaming, though the witnesses testified that the sound would stay with them forever.

Naomi had wanted judgement by the Vaik, as was her right as a female citizen. In his fevered and furious state Daidd took this as further proof of the inherent treachery of women. Naomi had made him feel these things, encouraged them, let him plot his life around her, then casually pulled a thread that unravelled the entire edifice and sauntered off into a future in which he had no part. The acid was a poor attempt at evening the score, at giving her a taste of the corrosion she’d unleashed on him. It seemed to him a kind of justice: to contort that face with its mask of innocence and ordinariness and force it to assume its true shape. False. Cruel. Monstrous.

That he was committed to stand trial, and under Vaik statute, when all he had done was right a wrong, disgusted him. This wasn’t justice. He’d served justice by delivering the restitution. When the presiding Vaik delivered her sentence—that Naomi could choose between Daidd being declared isvestyii or being doused in acid then sentenced to The Fortress for seven years—he spat on the ground. It was so unfair. He cursed Naomi. He cursed the Vaik. He cursed women.

He was escorted to an Aeraevest at the furthest end of the perimeter wall. The wall ran for nearly fourteen kilometres from the main buildings in one direction and just over sixteen in the other. One curve of the wall met a mountain range that served as a natural defence for the city nestled on the other side of it. The jagged teeth of the range made a landing from the water virtually impossible. Where the mountains gave way to a gentler undulation of hills and a small, natural harbour in The Dryans, the perimeter wall cut inland to keep a watch on any craft that might try to make land. All this had made sense two hundred years ago when any attack would have come from the sea, but who was going to invade them now? What enemy would announce themselves in a sailboat? Wars now came through fibre and cables, invasions of data and diseases of zeroes and ones.

It was ridiculous, his sentence. To keep watch from an Aeraevest looking to the sea and the harbour for twelve hours at a stretch, then to shimmy down the wooden ladder to his quarters and write his daily report: “Nothing sighted,” and send it through the shunt up the line to the Aeraevest ahead of him and from there to the nerve centre of The Fortress. Two pointless words telling the Vaik what they already knew, of no use to anyone, while he rotted away in his stone quarters.

He climbed the ladder and took up his post every day, not out of a sense of duty or obligation but because the confines of his quarters pressed in on him. His heart sped up and a tightness spread from the centre of his sternum outwards, a radial of pain and pressure so intense he felt his heart and lungs would burst within him. His palms grew clammy and little crosses sparkled at the edges of his vision—clear on his right side where his eyesight was unimpaired, blurry on his left where the acid had taken seventy percent of his vision. Less than he had taken from Naomi, the Vaik reminded him when she had tended his wounds after Naomi inflicted them. Naomi would never see again.

The panic attacks forced him out of his quarters and there was nowhere to go but the sentry post above. The maze of underground tunnels and shunts that connected each Aeraevest were kept locked, opening every three days to bring him more food and water, writing materials, medicines if he needed them.

To escape he would need to find a way down the wall. One side was a sheer drop to the sea; it was far too high to leap from, and the sea was ferocious until it flowed into the harbour. Daidd was a reasonable swimmer but by no means a strong one. The drop on the land-side was higher but less sheer; it might have been possible for him to slowly, carefully pick a path downwards through the jutting stone. But even assuming he could do so without being seen, the path would drop him in The Dryans. The acid burn would mark him as a Vaik prisoner, and they would hand him straight back. He could try to make his way along the top of the wall between sentry posts but he’d have to do it under cover of darkness. It was unlikely he’d be able to make it between sundown and sun-up. Once he hit the wooden ramparts the boards would squeak, alerting the people—either prisoners or Vaik—keeping watch in the other Aeraevest. Escape was impossible.

Even then Daidd did not consider suicide. His slow-burning sense of indignation and injustice kept him from self-harm. For seven years his world consisted of the three square metres of his quarters and the tower of the sentry post. He learnt to recognise the book-end of the seasons by the changing concentration of salt in the air; the colour of the sky; the seeds tossed up on the tide below his Aeraevest. For three of those years he went up and down the ladder between rock and sky, collared by sea and dirt until he realised that the enemy the Vaik had set him to watch was himself.

There were no intimations that he was approaching this revelation, no slowly evolving sense of understanding that delivered him, gently but inevitably, to the truth. Instead it burst on him all at once, the way a thunderclap will erupt from an invisible cross-current of air and shake the gods themselves. Naomi had never loved him; she’d barely noticed him. He’d felt for her and—in the usual way of male sensibility that credits itself with neither fancy nor entitlement—attributed the genesis of that feeling to her. Something she had created or willed. Something for which she was responsible.

He’d poured acid on a girl for whom he had barely existed.

The next day, the sestyatesh was over. The skies cleared and a tepid sunlight lazed to the ground. A fresh, clean smell was in the air as if it had been rinsed and polished.

Ulait was propped up on a low trolley, the blanket by her side if she needed it; Daidd gripped the trolley handle.

The Vaik leant towards Jonathon and surprised him by settling a gentle kiss on his cheek. “Goodbye, Jonathon Bridge. You won’t be with us much longer. Remember us on the other side.”

It hit him like a cold blast to the belly: he would be leaving soon. When the spring came, Mandalay would collect him from his quarters and lead him back the way he had come, through The Veya Gate and into the outer quarters where the electii lodged. They would take his masjythra and he would dress in the clothes he’d left in the basket. Adalia and his child—his child!—would be waiting for him on the other side of the wall. Would he be ready? He didn’t know.

“Goodbye, Ulait,” said the Vaik. “Take care of that foot—no more hiking during storms.”

Ulait smiled sheepishly. “I won’t.”

They set off along the track running by the perimeter wall. It was littered by debris from the sestyatesh, so they had to stop every few metres to bundle up boughs and sticks and palm fronds to clear the way. They passed clusters of workgroups patching up the low stone walls that bounded the fields. Other groups hacked at boughs fallen across roads. Jonathon wondered how the Vaik coped with natural disasters. Did they buy in supplies from the outside world when required? How did they raise capital? Who did their banking? The first gleam of an idea flashed for what he might do as a free man.

Ulait seemed to have divined his thoughts. “Will you be glad to leave us, Jonathon Bridge?”

He stooped to pick a bike wheel from the path and propped it against the gate to a neighbouring field. “Not to leave you, but to be with my wife and my baby, yes. To be a father.” He paused. A workgroup of silver masjythra shouldering shovels and hoes crossed a distant field. In the weak sun their garb was dull and unreflective. “To be a father, Mistress. I long for it.”

Ulait wrinkled her nose. “The Vaik have no use for fathers. I’m trying to imagine what a father is. What he does. Is it the same as being a mother, do you think?”

“I honestly don’t know, Mistress. Perhaps carrying a child and giving birth to it makes a difference to how you love. But I can’t imagine that I could love my baby any more than I do. It’s the biggest thing I can imagine. The most powerful.”

“Will you cry, do you think, when you see the baby for the first time?”

The tears rushed into his eyes at the thought. He laughed as he dashed them away. “All the evidence would suggest yes.”

And he cried some more at the realisation that this moment, which had seemed so remote, both temporally and spiritually, was nearly upon him.

“Come, my turn,” he said to Daidd as he assumed control of the trolley. They trundled on for a while, then Jonathon said, “I will miss you, Mistress. I will think of you often.”

Ulait’s mouth twisted. “And yet you defied me. You insulted me. You insulted the Vaik.”

“Yes. I was wrong. Forgive me.”

She seemed to think on this. He saw, then, the woman she would become. The sharp cheekbones that would be left behind when the last of her girlish roundness dissolved. The gold-flecked green eyes that would oversee these fields and the men that worked them for the rest of her days.

She smiled, the elastic face of adolescence returning. “I forgive you.”

They turned into the orchard where a party of Vaik were awaiting them. Mandalay broke into a run towards them and fell to the ground, throwing her arms around Ulait. “My darling girl,” she sobbed. “My darling girl.”

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” Ulait crooned, soothing her. Mandalay held the girl’s face in her hands and looked at her earnestly. “I was afraid, Ulait. I thought I’d lost you.” Mandalay rested her high, wide forehead against Ulait’s.

Ulait took Mandalay’s hand from her cheek and pressed her lips against her palm. “I was never in any real danger. I simply couldn’t walk well. I would have ridden out the storm even if I hadn’t found Daidd.”

Mandalay looked up at Daidd, her eyes tearing over again. “You got my girl to the sentry?”

Daidd nodded.

“Thank you.” Mandalay stood up and embraced Daidd, then she turned to Jonathon. “I thank you too, Jonathon Bridge.” She held him close.

He took the opportunity to whisper into her ear. “Mandalay, I must speak with you. The isvestyii—”

“Not now.” She drew away. “Come, you must be cold and hungry.”

They set off, the Vaik fussing over Ulait and giving their voluble thanks to Jonathon and Daidd. They were upon the footpath leading to the verandah when Jonathon was able to draw Daidd a little away from the others. “Daidd. I need to know. Ulait. Is she yours?”

He shook his head. “Those of us who make our home here, the permanent residents, we can’t. It’s taken care of. For consanguinity reasons. Only supplicants and national servicemen can impregnate Vaik.”

“You have no children.”

Daidd ran his hand over his stubbled chin, his eyes dark with fatigue. “No.” He turned from Jonathon and walked wearily up the stairs and along the verandah, a strange and solitary figure among the rejoicing, weaving Vaik.

On the first fine half after Ulait’s ankle had healed, she and Jonathon set off from the men’s quarters towards the Story-Keeping House. Both had packs slung across their backs. Most of the storm damage had been cleared away, but still they came across felled trees and crumbling stone walls. The skies were dull, and a fine mizzle hazed the air. There were rumours that returning olöcks had been sighted on the far side of the downs, and Ulait was excited at the prospect of seeing them.

“I’m surprised you’re still keen on olöcks, Mistress. Given what happened last time you went looking for them.”

“I’m even more keen on them.” She lifted her foot from the ground and wriggled her ankle. “I’m physically invested now.”

“If you lived in my city, you’d probably go and get a tattoo of an olöck and some foreign word meaning ‘kindred.’”

“What would be the point of that?”

“No one knows.”

Ulait planted her foot and set off again. “Sometimes the people in your city don’t sound too bright.”

“With that, Mistress, I would have to agree.”

They trekked purposefully over the countryside, canvassing various spots.

“Could this be it?” Ulait asked. They had come to a tumble of boulders within which was a mossy hollow.

“No. There weren’t boulders. Not that I remember. Just lots of branches and leaves in a thick tangle. I don’t think you could tell from the outside that there was a clearing within.”

Ulait pursed her lips and paused. “It’s possible that whatever was there was blown away in the sestyatesh.”

“Yes, I know.”

She scanned the landscape. “This way,” she said. “I have another idea.”

They passed over the rise and into the dell on the far side. They were trying to find the copse where Jonathon had hidden when he’d run from the Story-Keeping House. He’d described it to Ulait and she had some notion of where it might be. They marched up another hill and tacked diagonally across it until they came to a semicircle of imposing trees. The trees bent towards one another, conferring.

Jonathon poked into the tangle of branches, sheaved bark and leaves collected around the trunks. “I can’t be sure,” he said. “But I think this is the place.”

He was surprised how far it was from the Story-Keeping House, five or six kilometres at least. In his memory he’d run only a short way. He held the curtain of foliage back while Ulait scrambled under it. He followed, careful to keep the thorny twigs from his face. They slid off their packs and sat cross-legged in the clearing, facing each other. The air was damp and vegetative. Jonathon pushed back against his fear of being enclosed underground; he was determined to do this. The masjythra expanded around him like a blanket.

He opened his pack and removed a roughly fashioned wooden cross. He’d made it in the shed at the back of the shaenet from branches brought down by the storm. He’d sanded the wood back, treated it, then painted it blue. Blue like the water Eshtakai had swum in. In a strong, clear hand he’d painted “CLARA” in claret-coloured paint. Ulait dug a hole with a trowel, spooning out tree litter, then filled it in while Jonathon held the cross upright.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “My family weren’t churchgoers so I don’t know any prayers. And the Vaik don’t have any.”

“Just say what’s in your heart, and make the offer.”

He nodded.

“Clara.

“Clara.

“It’s Jonathon Bridge here. I’m not a religious man, or even a spiritual man, but I believe that, wherever you are, you can hear me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make the effort to know you better. I’m even sorrier that I didn’t help you when you needed me on your side. I don’t think I really got it. My sense of innocence got in the way of me really understanding. I am a giant to myself, and sightless. I hope you can forgive me.

“We’ll never have the opportunity to be friends now.

“My friend Ulait is here. She is Vaik and she has authorised me to offer you sanctuary here. Your spirit is welcome at The Fortress. Come rest here with the people who will honour you.

“Work. History. Sex. Justice.

“Amen.”

Ulait and Jonathon sat silently for a while. He thought back to his encounter with Daidd at the sentry post. (He didn’t know what to call it. “Sex” implied consent, but he had not wanted it. “Rape” wasn’t accurate either. “Encounter” it was, then.) At first, he had thought of Clara’s suicide as the logical endpoint of her rape. She may have stepped into it, but her rapist had tied that noose, and Jonathon and his colleagues had helped her to slip it over her head.

Lately, though, he had begun to wonder if her suicide was better understood as an act of defiance. The rape was an incursion, her body a white flag. Clara was obviously tough. She’d gotten out of The Dryans and into Jonathon’s world, so he couldn’t believe that she hadn’t tried to wrestle her body back. When that proved impossible, was death a final act of defiance? A flight from her flesh?

It was late when Mandalay appeared in his doorway. He’d been struggling to sleep again; every time he closed his eyes he saw the wave holding the isvestyii and dragging him down into the grey deep. The noise of the returning seabirds then kept him awake. He lay very still, watching her. Her red hair fell down her back, her luminous skin a profound contrast against her dark green gown. He did not recall that the first time they’d met, in the antechamber where she’d recited the terms of his confinement, he had not found her attractive. He desired her now, in the way he desired all powerful things.

He was afraid of her, too.

She stepped softly on bare feet into his room and relaxed against his window.

“You can feel the season turning. It’s always a strange time for me. All the new supplicants are locked in, the national servicemen signed up. We prepare to say goodbye to the men we’ve come to know. We decide on the new plantings. There’s a spate of pregnancies and passings. It’s the season of opposites.”

Jonathon understood this. He both wanted and did not want for her to slip out of her gown and join him in his bed.

“You understand what is required,” she spoke to the night air rather than to him, “with Ulait?”

“Yes,” he said softly.

She pulled a string on her gown and it fell in lush folds to the ground. He threw back the bedclothes for her and she slid beside him. He did not understand why she was in his bed. She had already vetted him for Ulait and made it clear that she didn’t think much of him as a human being. Perhaps his endeavours in the sestyatesh had softened her heart towards him. Perhaps it was no more than a way to pass the time.

She made him nervous. Even when she was tracing her fingers down his back, he was thinking, Those claws.

He also thought of Daidd, who loved this woman; had chosen to hold his will in permanent abeyance to remain close to her. There had been a time when Jonathon relished the idea of cuckolding other men. Now, Daidd’s longing just made him sad. Or perhaps Daidd had truly surmounted possessiveness. Jonathon could not bear the idea of another man touching Adalia and acknowledged his own hypocrisy in this.

It was impossible for him to reconcile his various fears and desires so he shut his mind off, focusing only on Mandalay’s body. He approached her as a cartographer might. He committed to memory the pearly claw marks around her hips, the knuckles that seemed too large for her long fingers. He studied the arch of her foot, her faceted ankle. The milky skin overlaid on taut muscle. He listened intently to the precise way she enunciated his name. Jonathon Bridge. The way an admiral might address a sailor who’d seen the same action, even though their lives overlapped in no other way.

When it was over, and before Mandalay’s breathing steadied and she stood up to leave, Jonathon tried to raise the subject of the isvestyii, but she cut him off.

“I’m not your confessor,” she said. “You need to learn to carry it.”

Jonathon thought this unfair. After all, the Vaik had promised that an isvestyii would “dissolve to nothing.” But he had not. His death was lodged in Jonathon’s body: behind his eyelids and in the hands that had shoved the man from the perimeter wall.

If the isvestyii had been electrocuted in a state prison or lanced with a Vaik blade and left to drown, it wouldn’t have cost Jonathon a moment’s concern. But he couldn’t place the thing apart from himself. He would have to craft a narrative to make sense of it, integrate it. The Woman—whoever or whatever she was—had said he would judge. Despite the horror of what he had seen and continued to see, he thrilled to the idea that he had a part in Vaik cosmology.

“I contain worlds,” he said in the darkness. Mandalay wrapped her arms around him and pulled him towards sleep.