Jirayu holds her wife through the night, after answering a text from Noor about Yvette’s sudden disappearance, briefly explaining to em that all is under control.
Yvette sleeps curled up, her face against Jirayu’s stomach, her hand on the base of Jirayu’s spine, clutching like a prayer. A position of incredible intimacy, more than facing each other: it lets Jirayu defend this hound of hers that can be so tender, so fragile, in ways that have nothing to do with the physical—with blood and bullets, with bent spines and maimed hands. Those things can be final, but they’re shallow too. In Yvette there are deeper wounds, and those Jirayu alone can soothe.
She’s not without introspection. Occasionally she examines her own draw to Yvette, the particularities of ownership. Yvette came to her feral; she delighted in taming that, in molding the clay of this woman to her own will and preferences. She did not anticipate learning—or caring—that Yvette is full of scars, or that she would come to like tending the injuries old and new. Jirayu’s never thought of herself as especially nurturing.
She imagines their positions switched: she the seeker across timelines, Yvette the objective. She’s not able to imagine it (and would she be more ironclad and impervious to tragedy when she knows what she felt when she lost Yvette), and nor can she find it in herself to develop contempt for the openness of Yvette’s grief. Once she thought she would. She hates all signs of weakness, in herself and in others. The last time she genuinely wept was at her mother’s funeral, and even then away from public eyes: only Noor saw it, her sole confidante of that era.
Jirayu runs her fingers through the russet luxury of Yvette’s hair, considering the matter of Ingvild. A cognate, per Yvette’s report, but that does not mean she is immortal. Jirayu has arranged plenty of assassinations. Death at a distance. Sometimes the necessity arises.
Yvette stirs past midnight, disappearing into the kitchen then coming back with water for herself, chilled jasmine tea for Jirayu. She pours both with care: in her homeland, potable water is the most precious of resources, pricier than ammunition or landmines. She sits on the floor by habit, her head leaning against Jirayu’s knee.
“Do you want me to get you more collars?” Jirayu teases, playing with the base of Yvette’s skull, feeling the fuzz of hair there.
“Yes.” This is said without embarrassment or hesitation. “Soft leather’s nice. Doeskin, suede. I like wearing something that lets you seize me by the throat.”
“I don’t think we’ve tried breathplay yet.” She circles her wife’s neck with her fingers, light, no pressure on the carotid, the jugular. “How hard are you to kill?”
Yvette stiffens against her hand, looking up. “That’s a new come-on for you. I hate to admit it works; I’m imagining things suddenly. But I have the feeling you don’t mean you’re going to drag me into bed and try choking me out.”
“Oh, I’ll get around to it. But you did what you did at the EmQuartier, and I’m accounting for Ingvild having the same enhancements you do. It’d explain how she captured a man who put a hit out on me.”
“So you’re thinking of another woman while I’m right here?” Yvette’s expression sobers. “No, that’s a safe assumption. If she’s like me, then she’s much harder to take out than—I don’t mean to brag. But Noor probably told you what happened to those mercenaries.”
“Can you dodge bullets?”
A laugh. “I haven’t tried. With the mercenaries, I had the advantage of surprise and being able to see in the dark.”
Jirayu leans over and takes one of Yvette’s hands into her own, to feel its strength. It does not seem different from any other hand, from the hand of her original Yvette. “And you snapped their necks like little birds.”
Her wife seems, almost, bashful: a Doberman that has performed a fantastic bit of butchery, but which must now behave herself within the house, no more blood on the muzzle. “It was easy in the moment. Convenient. A gun would have given away my position, and I didn’t want to test how bulletproof my body armor was.”
She kisses a knuckle. “You could toss me around.”
“I’d never, unless you really want me to. But yes. Probably.”
“Snipers could manage Ingvild,” she muses. “Or a construction site accident. I’ve got the address of the woman Ingvild is seeing, so that’s one more potential site of ambush.”
Yvette doesn’t ask whether the woman in question would become collateral damage: of course she would. Banal necessities. “You’re not worried your Vector liaison will take issue?”
“Tatiana didn’t tell me Ingvild is one of theirs, how was I supposed to know? And in any case, better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission—I believe that’s an American saying.” She pauses. “What happened, when you disappeared from the bar? You don’t have to tell me, but it might be informative.”
“I was . . . pulled into another timeline.” A harsh inhalation. “It wasn’t a good one.”
The haunted look tells Jirayu enough.
Her phone vibrates against the nightstand. She picks up, glances at the message. “Speak of the devil. Tatiana’s summoned me, at my earliest convenience naturally.”
“You’re not going.”
Jirayu laughs. “It’s a little obvious. As much as I want to ask them questions, I’m not only your anchor but your bait, and handing myself to them—well, the Vector wants you anchored here, so if they kill me, this timeline could well reject you. They do have something complex in mind and I need to find out what. I’ll tell Tatiana we could try a video call, I’m busy. Don’t worry, Yvette. I just got you back. I’m in no hurry to part ways again.”
She’s midway through tapping out a response to Tatiana when the fire alarm goes off. The noise grows to a penetrating keen quickly; by then she’s on her feet, moving toward her office. A quick look at the security cameras—advantage of living in a building she owns—shows her that the alarm originated from an unoccupied floor, used only as storage. There is no fire or smoke there.
Yvette appears in the doorway, already sheathed in body armor. “Do we stay or go?”
“Seeing that someone wants us out?” She straightens, begins to formulate her next words, when glass shatters.
There’s only one room on her floor with sufficient glass to make that noise and her first instinct, irrational, is anger: that someone would attack her here, would damage the garden she and Yvette have made together. She tamps that down, switches camera feeds, and finds dead bodies two floors up—her own security. Another switch to the garden. Glass glitters across the plants, clinging to leaves and petals in the way of new ice. The camera’s angle shows her ammunition casings on the ground, little brass seeds that have pierced the panoramic pane.
“Out, then,” she says, shutting down the alarm. “The basement hasn’t been breached.” One of the most secure parts of the building, with several means of egress.
They leave through a second corridor. Outwardly the floor plans look conventional enough; Jirayu and some of her guards know better. There are panic rooms that don’t appear on the schematics, and more corridors and exits than there are on paper. She is fond of her residence—she is sentimental about the plants—but if damage to the architecture is irreparable, she has other properties. Objects can be replaced. Her wife cannot, and she herself has but one life.
A door that locks behind them, and then another. The entire edifice has been erected and designed for the kind of security most people don’t have to think about. It makes Jirayu look paranoid, but circumstances prove again and again the necessity of such measures.
Jirayu pulls open another door and is greeted by a sudden drop in temperature, air so frigid that instantly her skin gooses. Immediately she knows something is wrong, displaced. What waits beyond is not the path down she expected, a katabasis of stairwells that’d lead straight to the basement, but instead a chamber done in cool greens, furniture in the shades of deep jungle. A window that looks out not to Krungthep but to a view of Vector ships high above, orbiting Earth with their wild, tangled silhouettes. Where the aliens’ true bodies reside.
She expects Tatiana, but the mannequin is entirely different from their austere black-and-white. Behind her Yvette says, “Gamayun.”
The alien avatar spreads their arms wide, bowing to Jirayu. “I heard someone wanted to talk to me. Oh, and don’t fret, we’re not really in Khun Jirayu’s building. This is a little trick of spacetime, a pretty bubble floating through a pretty sea. Out there in the real world, I believe one of your enemies has staged an assault. Someone gave them the means to disable your security systems. What a coincidence that all your past nemeses have decided to avenge themselves upon you within the last few days, don’t you think?”
“It’s obviously not a coincidence.” Jirayu draws close to the creature, curious, intrigued by how different they look from Tatiana. So much more colorful, more like semiprecious stones. “Are we on your ship?”
The mannequin’s eyes twitch. They do not have the lids with which to blink. “In this timeline? We don’t have that sort of control. I must be present here in very tiny, very circumspect ways. But you are so curious! I like that. Ask your questions.”
“How long can we stay here and be safe? Who or what caused all these incidents to pile up at my doorstep?”
“It’ll take a decent amount of time before Vector calculation triangulates on this pocket of trickery, so we have—five hours? After that we’ll need to relocate.” Gamayun gestures toward the seats. “The other question is more complex to answer. There are active agents, and there’s a quantum tendency. Both contribute.”
“Elaborate,” says Jirayu.
“I don’t want to break your spirit. You’ll learn soon enough.” They laugh. “I’m not going to give away my overall plan to you, though—these things could be tortured out of you, you know—and I’m not going to explain our civil war, because that is truly a long and tedious subject.”
“You wanted Yvette in this specific timeline.” Jirayu watches the unlovely mask, the naked cabling in their neck. “Why?”
They make a rattling noise that she suspects is meant to imitate laughter. “I was rehearsing to myself a tidy story. I could tell you that the two of you are vastly special, etched with extraordinary destinies; human tales are full of those, yes? Very popular? The truth is that each branch has its own fault lines, and those require cognates of specific resonance to touch their wavefunctions. You see, Khun Jirayu, I’d like the two of you to find Helix Three Corolla’s most brittle points, the ones that’ll let me shatter the Vector’s hold on it.”
For this, the creature has sacrificed—or has allowed the deaths of—countless instances of Yvette. “And why would I work with you?”
“Because the Vector’s arrival took away your wife.” Gamayun’s head tilts toward Yvette, at an angle more birdlike than human. “You must understand. I’m not the one responsible for that, or for her removal from other branches either. What happened is that the Vector runs a lot of simulations—we do have terribly powerful machines—to locate cognates, and that’s a persistent state; you’re a cognate in one branch and sure enough you’re a cognate in all the others. So out of that pool, they run another set of simulations: which paired cognate in Comet One Nucleus might be dead?”
Jirayu takes hold of a decorative fern; she resists the urge to shred its fronds, if only to take out her vexation on something. “I’m not following that part.”
“Each cognate who has experienced their partner’s death leaves Comet One Nucleus,” says Gamayun patiently, “to seek another instance of the dead half, in whatever branch they can get to. It’s an epidemic of behavior, like mice lured to scraps of bread. Sometimes to the point they spontaneously translate, unguided, uncalibrated. I take pity on them and make sure they leave us safely, but each of them holds a trace of how One Nucleus may be found. So the Vector gets to work, preparing for their arrivals, luring them to branches under Vector control. A branch can hold one instance of a single person, barring rare exceptions, so your Yvette had to be removed for our Yvette to enter Helix Three Corolla and stay.”
She doesn’t point out that no instance of Yvette is theirs. “None of this strikes me as efficient.”
“I actually agree.” The mannequin mask issues a noise that approximates a chuckle. “The Vector needs cognates too, and they’re destroying their own supply. Still, there are so many branches, so many cognates, and when you have a self-renewing resource it’s tempting to squander them here and there.”
Yvette has leaned against one of the odd-looking seats. She gives Gamayun a sidelong glance. Behind her, silver shadows froth and sweep across the wall. “This is more than you’ve ever explained to me.”
“You just don’t have the right kind of personality, Yvette. Your wife is more . . . cause-oriented.” Something in the back of Gamayun’s head winks. It disappears, the slit sealing back into the material, seamless. “Besides, I could get you to work for me by promising you could meet her again—which I have delivered—so there was no need to get into all this. With you, Khun Jirayu, I have to really lay out the details to persuade.”
Jirayu watches one of the Vector ships; a tendril stretches, seeking its mate on another vessel. The two ships drift close together, linking up, to communicate perhaps. She’s never seen them in such detail, and not more than one at once. What rings Earth—if it is even her version of Earth—is a mass of conjoined briars, the edges of them in constant motion, ribbons of lacquered green-black reaching always toward one another. “These aren’t actually ships, are they? Or that’s not their sole function—these must be your quantum processors.”
Gamayun makes a hum in their throat, or what passes for their throat, an artificial construct of vocal cords and speakers. “You’re too clever for your own good, Khun Jirayu, though you’re not exactly correct. Allow me to anticipate your next question: why wouldn’t you just work for the Vector? Well, the obvious part is that they erased Yvette’s existence and while I don’t know you the best, I know enough to suspect you’ve been contemplating justice or at least vengeance.”
The means toward it handed to her on a platter: she imagines lopping off Tatiana’s head in slow motion. “What happens if we agree to work for you and we succeed in removing the Vector from this timeline?”
They put a skeletal hand to their robed chest. “Why, do you think I’ll simply eliminate the two of you then? For what reason? You’ve been consorting too long with criminals. Once you have achieved that, we’ll leave you in peace. Branch by branch we’ll prune our enemies, removing their footholds and their gaze. That, Khun Jirayu, is how we will win.”
She does not attempt to read their expression, their body language. It is all marionette, no more scrutable than trying to divine the intent of a shark. There are only teeth. “Tell me what we’re up against—what will be thrown at us—and I’ll consider it.”
“First, let me give you a tool.” They draw from their robe a small black object. “This will come in useful.”
I did not, quite, want this. But in this as in all things, Jirayu leads and I follow. She has agreed to meet with Tatiana, and she will carry a gift from Gamayun that’ll double as both her weapon and means of self-defense. Most likely, Gamayun said, she will not need it—the Vector will not yet act until they have me in hand, to open me up and core me like a fruit in search of the path to One Nucleus.
But as far as they’re concerned, I told Jirayu, you can be held hostage against me—
She smiled. That’s true. Yet I’m good at negotiation and haggling, my hound. I told you, I’m in no hurry to part ways again. I’ll come back to you.
And so she’s left me to my part: Ingvild.
According to Noor’s report to Jirayu, the Norwegian hasn’t returned to her apartment since we raided it—she has spooked and relocated to a cheap motel.
Her new hideout is an extraordinarily ugly tenement, nearly as ugly as American ones, squat blocks of bricks and whitewashed walls. One single neon sign, jaundiced, indicates it’s a place of accommodation. Sometimes I’d walk the grimiest soi of Krungthep, the dimmest and poorest warrens, and try to imagine this might be what the empire’s last days were like. America as it lay dying, gripped by its own avarice and gluttony. There are still towns there intact, I hear—it’s a big place and not everything fell apart—but that’s as hard for me to conceptualize as the pearly gates or the brimstone courts I was told about as a child. All of it seems to me a fantasy.
(Occasionally I wonder what it’d have been like if I’d been born in a functional country instead of a war zone, a country that cares for its people; how I’d have turned out without the brutalities of my infancy. But this is a useless thought, and in any case I might never have met Jirayu, and isn’t she worth the tradeoff? Besides, by all accounts my homeland never loved its people even at the height of its wealth and complacency. A place defined by self-loathing, by the inevitability of its self-destruction. There’s a Little America in Hong Kong and an Americatown in Pattaya, but I’ve never visited either. Why turn to a zoo exhibit in search of a cultural connection? I may be driftwood, but I have dignity.)
Stakeouts are tedious, but much of the work has already been done. I take up a spot in a nearby warehouse that gives me a decent vantage point of the motel’s entrance—it has just the one—and watch the feeds from cameras Noor’s people have set up. For the most part this means monitoring the goings and comings of stray dogs, their skirmishes over scraps, their pack hierarchy. A little like my childhood. I catalogue passersby, residents of this area: a heavyset white man in his fifties with ruddy, blotched skin; a pair of Filipino tourists sightseeing the slums; vendors wheeling their food carts past. The majority of people would find this boring, but I enjoy people-watching, if only because it fascinates me to observe what people are like who don’t share my origins. Normal people. The median.
Toward the evening, Ingvild appears, accompanied by a lithe woman with the features of a fox, all sharp angles and darting gaze. She is laughing, loudly, as if disbelieving the conditions she is seeing around her. Ingvild shakes her head—I imagine she is saying that she offered to take this girl to a hotel—but the woman grins and, likely, responds that she enjoys the authenticity. She’s slumming.
I wait until they’re both in the motel before I follow. Let them disappear into Ingvild’s room: it’s a little sordid, but this guarantees the best chance of success.
Through what passes for a lobby, and then up cracked cement steps. I already know her room number, but the walls are so thin I can hear them regardless. The vulpine girl has a high, bell-like laugh. “But you can afford much better than this, you’ve said as much,” she’s saying. “Is this, like, a thing where you’re some rich heiress out to gain novel . . . perspective?”
“Something like that.” Ingvild’s voice is accented, touched with smoke. My luck that they’re both speaking English. “How about a river cruise after this? You don’t want to spend the night here. Might get bedbugs on you. I’ve seen cockroaches and rats.”
The girl giggles. I lightly touch the lock, but the entire internal architecture’s flimsy. It’d crumble if I breathe on it hard enough. I draw my gun, step back, and kick in the door.
There’s much to be said for alien enhancements—it’s like tearing through cardboard. Plaster dust fills the room, a false snow; the girl screams; Ingvild has come to her feet. About right for the muzzle of my gun to alight on her brow. “Hello, Ingvild,” I say, not raising my voice—there’s no need.
She stares up, paying no attention to her companion scrambling out the door. “You are Jirayu’s paired cognate.”
No pretense. That makes it quick. I pull the trigger.
The bullet hits the floor. A plume of debris rises. I twist around to meet her as she slams me into the wall. The thing should give—it has surely not been built to absorb this much impact—but it stands, and then she brings her knee into my midsection.
For a moment I can’t think. I’ve been hit before; this is like being rammed by a bull. My teeth clatter against my tongue as I gag on my saliva and fold. But I’m not out yet. A desperate draw of air and I’m swinging.
Ingvild catches my wrist at about the same time I slam my head into her nose. She reels back and I press the advantage, grabbing for her throat. Somehow she slips free, then out of reach. In a movement so fluid it looks balletic, she grabs my gun off the floor and points it at me. Her feet are planted apart, her stance military-correct. One hand clasped over her nose as she wheezes: I failed to completely break it. “You fucking idiot,” she rasps, spitting blood, “I’ve been trying to protect your wife.”
Were she at a disadvantage, she would of course be saying anything to distract me. She is not at a disadvantage. “From what?”
“The Bulwark. Who do you think has been murdering her across timelines? To limit your pathfinding and to guide you toward a specific branch? I was assigned to see to her safety here.” She hawks up a mix of phlegm and red froth. “So is this it? The branch you’re supposed to be, your destination?”
I say nothing. You never surrender information unless you have to.
“Look.” She lowers her hand. Her nose looks more whole than it has any right to be. I inflicted more damage than this. “The Vector has no reason to erase Ms. Jirayu. She needs to be around to lure you out of One Comet Nucleus, after all.”
When I continue my silence, she makes an exasperated grunt and tosses my gun at my feet. “Fine, you can try threatening me with that again. Who do you think killed your wife in your originating branch? And were you ever told about the reflective effect? That if someone dies in enough timelines, the rest of their instances are likelier to follow suit? Something about the waveform adjusting toward the mean. There’s only really one to a person, mathematically. There could be a hundred thousand copies of someone, but there’s only ever the one soul.”
“I’m not dead,” I say, the obvious.
“How many of you are?” She wipes blood from her mouth. “And you’re paired to her in every branch, right? There’s something to it—a persistence of state, the universe correcting toward uniformity. Fate, if you want to call it that. Meet one of you and I’ve met them all. A sufficient number of your instances have been reduced to corpses, and . . . ”
I hold her gaze. I notice, belatedly, the pinpoints of light deep in her irises. Funny how I didn’t pick up those while I was trying to destroy her face. Details disappear into the visceral act, into the calculation of velocity against the tensile strength of cartilage. I pick up my gun. Holster it. “There’s no reason for me to believe anything you’re saying. And there’s no way for your nose to be in one piece.”
“Skeptical bastard,” she says, with no real rancor. “I can’t prove any of this to you, because they’re quantum events we can’t observe since we aren’t aliens. As for the nose, I’ve got better implants than you. Why don’t we call a truce? Right now we have a shared interest—keeping your wife alive.”
Against reason, that rankles me. “I’m letting you nowhere near her.”
“Please. I’m not going to steal her romantic attention; she’s not my type.” Ingvild chuckles. “I’m not even mad you ruined my date, it was going nowhere anyway—awful personality; thighs to die for, though. Listen, I’m not duty-bound to my masters. They’re aliens. If your side offers me something better, I’ll defect, as long as you don’t mind that the Bulwark’s been killing versions of your wife.”
“The Vector’s been killing my instances.”
She picks up a towel, shakes plaster dust off it, and smudges it with her own blood. “And? What do you care about more, her deaths or your own?”
No attempt at denying her handlers’ guilt. “I’m not working with you.”
The woman puts one hand on her hip. “So what will you do instead, try to kill me again? I was going easy on you. In a serious fight I’ll wring your little American neck.”
I consider shooting her now until I remember that she, somehow, was not there to meet the bullet when I tried the first time. In close combat, I’m sure of myself—she’s unlikely to have let me ram my skull into her nose to prove a point about her regenerative capabilities—but the fact she could disappear and reappear behind me is a cause for concern. “Don’t come near Jirayu,” I say.
“You know you’re not out of the woods, yes? That her destiny still tends toward an early end, and a brutal one too? Listen—”
By then I’ve already walked away.
A building of chrome and glass, ordinary from the outside. Inside it is frigid, and eerily deserted. The foyer is host to a single counter, a single receptionist. There is no other visitor here but Jirayu; her footfalls resonate with peculiar acoustics, and in certain parts of the hall she can nearly hear a crowd, in spite of the emptiness. She half-expects the receptionist to be the same Chinese woman she saw in that little house one year ago, but it’s a different one: Indian, traditionally dressed. Dark green sari and gold trims. Heavy earrings. Minimal makeup.
In mannerism though, she reminds Jirayu of that Chinese woman. There is a distance, as though the receptionist considers herself already separate from the human race, adopted into alienness. A cognate, most likely. She welcomes Jirayu and lets her know that Tatiana is waiting on floor eight.
The lift has a mirror on every side. It never stops at any floor. She hears, again, the commotion of a crowd: music, clinking glasses, laughter. But she is certain as she ascends that they are recorded sounds, or they are hallucinations. The ride isn’t long, but she has a sense of time turning elastic. A minute lingers too long, and then the next snaps past as though it was only a second. Jirayu’s sense of herself is clean and certain—it is not her nerves fraying; rather she is being toyed with. Were she to demand of Tatiana an answer for this, she’d be told that of course the aliens cannot manipulate time itself, only the construction and location of paths between different waveform streams. All is convenient facade, hinged on how little she’s been allowed to know.
She’s gleaned some information since, and means to learn more still. The idea of an alien benefactor come to uplift humans from war and poverty has always been a farce. If she’s learned anything in her days of business, it is that two sapient species can only have an adversarial relationship, more so because the Vector treats Earth as a colony of cattle more than a territory of equals. At the beginning the public was relieved there was no plundering of resources, but then the aliens have no use for rare earths, fossil fuel, or freshwater. They see no value in gold or diamonds. But they have plenty of use for human bodies, and hasn’t that always been the driving impetus of war—the utilization of flesh, the venting of blood. All of it circles back.
Finally the lift reaches its destination. Floor eight, out of forty. It should not have taken this long.
A bare foyer: linoleum tiles, flimsy plastic chairs arranged in circles. Stuffed toys have been seated on them, all crusted in thick dust—she can barely recognize which animal each is meant to be—and overhead spider webs glimmer. She goes past them quickly. It is pointless to question what these are for, though occasionally on one of her meetings with Tatiana she’d wonder if the alien has arranged a stretch of space that comes from another timeline: one where Krungthep has been abandoned en masse, struck by some insidious disaster, high-rises emptied out. Complete quiet in the streets, highways laden with the carcasses of vehicles. Sometimes her imagination runs away.
Through a door of termite-eaten wood, and she’s at her appointment.
Tatiana’s room is always the same no matter which building it is, a trick of spacetime as Gamayun said, a room that’s not physically in Krungthep at all or in any other city for that matter. The temperature is slightly friendlier than the lobby’s. Glass tanks line the walls, gurgling quietly, each full of diaphanous reefs and quick-moving shadows. They have no visible features—no matter how long she looks, Jirayu can’t make them out as anything but black shapes cutting through water.
“Welcome,” Tatiana says without looking at her, showing her the back of their slender, faceted cranium. Jirayu has suspected the eyes in Tatiana’s face are decorative, that the mannequin must have sensors throughout their puppet body, ones that let them perceive the world in three-sixty degrees. “I understand you’ve been through a lot recently. Your nerves seem as steady as ever. It’s commendable and exceptional in humans.”
“I want some answers.”
“Naturally.” Her handler turns around, giving her a view of that minimalist face, the monochrome portrait interrupted by a single red moue. “Would you like to sit? The story of our civil war isn’t a simple or short one.”
There is cold bottled water for her, waiting on a tray. It seems almost comical—water, nothing else, plain and icy. Never tea or juice, and no food. “What do you eat, anyway?”
“Nothing you’d recognize as edible. I shall spare you the grisly details of our digestion. Dead stars are difficult to break down; it’s fortunate we need to eat only rarely.” They run their long hand down their long arm that has a few joints too many. Their bird-claw fingers crack. “Our existence has been long, and we’ve always searched hard for another sapient species. You’re the rarest of events. Most life that forms amounts to no great intelligence, little capacity for society or communication with us. Isn’t it your collective dream to meet with extraterrestrial life, strangers from beyond the stars? Why wouldn’t we have a similar dream? There’s a future, Jirayu, where both our species will improve one another in stunning symbiosis. That is the goal of the Vector.”
Many words to say nothing, propaganda or cult doctrine. “And your opposition?”
They lay their hand against one of the tanks. “They don’t support our project to share knowledge and tech with your species. To them you’re a threat since you may both perceive and translate across branches, acting on them without bending the branch’s waveform as we do—you have a certain freedom we lack. The shape of the greater tree is brittle and must be preserved, and our presence often has a corrosive effect. Our enemies, then, would prefer we leave humanity alone so there’s less risk to the higher-dimension structure. Total and complete severance from Earth, or else the elimination of humanity as a species—that is the goal of the Bulwark.”
Jungle logic: symbiotes or adversaries. Jirayu sips from the bottle. It is like drinking down a glacier. “To be frank, I haven’t seen you improving us in any noticeable way. I’m sure you will say it’s a process that takes decades—”
“Centuries,” Tatiana says patiently. “But on a personal, individual level, we’ve modified many cognates. They’ve received the bodies of their dreams, in every aspect. Better health, better life expectancy, minor alterations or total replacements to their endocrine systems and neurology. Whatever they want can be had—the physique of a war god, the beauty of an eternal seeress. The same offer, as you know, extends to you. You don’t need to get sick ever again; your body will never fail you.”
“I appreciate the thought.” And it is tempting: she has seen the changes in Yvette, borne witness to the demonstration of preternatural strength. “I’ll keep it in mind if I come down with something terminal.”
“Preventative care is better, I’m sure you are aware. In any case, the Bulwark has identified you as crucial to their offensive in a specific timeline. Either here or elsewhere—I’m negotiating with other instances of you—and my calculation suggests Three Corolla is the Bulwark’s true target. I don’t suppose you would consider coming into protective custody.”
“No.” And, Jirayu intuits, that is not what would dovetail with Tatiana’s plans either: they want her out and about. Seizing on that thought, she says, “You promised to find my wife.”
Now more than ever she wishes for comprehensible body language, for a representation of Tatiana that she can decipher. The avian skull twitches. There is no other tell. “She is present across other branches. But I can hardly tear her away from your permutations. I’m searching for a version that’s been parted from you in some way, one that’ll come to you and be your companion. After all, it’s been only a year. Surely you can wait longer.”
“Surely,” Jirayu murmurs, “you must have a better guarantee than that.”
“And what would you like, more jewelry of hers, more photographs? A recording of her voice? Or perhaps,” Tatiana adds, thoughtful, “to see her for just a moment?”
She must keep up the act. “That would be better than photographs, yes.”
“Then that can be arranged.” They point to another door, this one solid and supple, painted pale turquoise. “Go through that. You get three minutes. I’m sending you to a branch where your instance remains alive, so it’ll quickly reject you.”
Tatiana is ready to do nearly anything to persuade her to remain the Vector’s. Whatever she sees in the other room will be a trap, a lie. But she opens the door.
Sunlight on the other side. The door has shut behind her, has disappeared entirely. She is in her own office in the high-rise and the noon sun is strong, pouring through the window. At her desk, Yvette is arranging flowers in a vase, trimming leaves and peeling off undesirable petals. Her hands are precise with the shears.
When she looks up, Jirayu’s heart seizes. It does not make sense: she has her own Yvette. But it’s the same person, every time, the same effect on her heart, her being, her soul. “Shouldn’t you be in Singapore?” says her wife, in a low amused voice as though of course Jirayu would come home early to see her, to watch her working with roses and catkins. To observe the sure movements of her fingers with things that have unfurled from seeds into brilliant blooms.
“Yvette.” Jirayu swallows past a knot in her throat. Absurd. This is a different instance, this is not her Yvette. Yet what does that matter. It is the same soul; it is always the same soul. “Are you happy?”
“I’m married to the most beautiful woman in the world—as far as I’m concerned anyway—and the Vector’s given us everything. We’ll live forever, or pretty close to it. We’ll never have to be afraid. I couldn’t be happier.”
This is wrong. The setting is correct, even the flower arrangement is fine: her original liked gardening, so why not this. She watches Yvette’s long body and even the dialect it yields to the world is nearly right, yet a few touches removed from what it should be. Too neat and relaxed, when Yvette gives off the impression of coiled strength, of violent motion barely held in check. Tatiana will say, It is variations on the tree, Jirayu, not all of them will be identical to what you recall. In another life, she might hold herself this way. Yet she’s married to you every time, isn’t that wonderful?
“What am I like?” Jirayu asks softly.
Her wife chuckles. Dust motes swirl gently around her, limning her in radiance. A single perfect moment, a single perfect Yvette, preserved for all eternity. “Such an odd question. You’re my wife. You hold my world. You’re the stars and the sun, and I wouldn’t be what I am without you. What are you like? You could ask me to describe the sky. It is above, and it is impossibly vast.”
She wonders what she would find if she reaches out to touch this Yvette, what she would discover if she plunges her hand into those roses. But she is not given to useless whims; what she needs is what she can use. So she turns around and says, “I’ll see you soon.”
Back past the door, to the waiting mannequin. Who says, “Your control must be steel. That was less than three minutes.”
“I’m not the weepy sort, Tatiana.” She puts into her words the professional remoteness she shows her accountants and secretaries, addressing a lesser. “I’ve received my proof—no point lingering and making a fuss to a version of my wife that would be confused in any case. What do you want from me, then? I’m targeted by Bulwark; and so?”
“I will train you to cross the branches. You have a particular affinity for seeking the points where the Bulwark’s hold on a timeline is weak. And this way you’ll be attracted, too, toward branches where Yvette is on her own and will act as your anchor. You can take your pick of her, find the one that suits you the best. Softer or harder than your original, more or less malleable. With or without the more difficult components of her history. Wouldn’t that be a fine opportunity?”
“Are there branches where she’s dead? The normal way. Not erased.”
“There would have to be.” Their voice is placid. “It is inevitable. There are branches where you are dead the normal way too.”
Jirayu gives in, then, to impulses held back so long. She gets close; she takes hold of the collar of Tatiana’s robe. It feels slippery to the touch, more so than any velvet or silk. The way it bunches up in her hand is nearly like paper. “And who has been killing her, Tatiana?”
“Who can say? Chance is a factor. Sometimes a train arrives late or there is a delayed flight; a woman crosses a street and she’s run over by a car; a traitor acts and a person falls. It’s not all down—or up—to us.”
She doesn’t need the body language, or even tone. For once the words themselves suffice. Her hand closes around Tatiana’s neck. “You removed her from this timeline—it couldn’t have been accidental, a lot more people would’ve disappeared if it was—and you must have removed her from several more, if not all of them.”
The mannequin does not resist. “You’re being irrational, Khun Jirayu. We offer you everything. Power too; to be a cognate is no insignificant thing. It allows you to remain somebody in the new order.”
“You,” she says, her voice scraping, “took my wife from me.”
“Does it matter? There are infinite copies of her.”
“You want to own me. That’s not happening.”
“It’s not ownership.” Their robe susurrates against itself, like distant leaves. So delicate. “You must understand. The Bulwark has jeopardized your waveform, warping it around their purposes, changing the tendencies of your fate toward an inevitable terminus. We wage our war through the pairing structure between you and your wife. And it doesn’t take much to tip the scale. If you wish to experience the world without our protection, to see what happens when the Bulwark’s changes come for you, I’ll let you—right now.”
Her hands are grasping empty air. Broad, harsh daylight washes over her. The vibrations of train tracks. It is not Krungthep: somewhere further out, less urbanized, the skyline not so filled with edifices that yearn to puncture the heavens and bathe in their firmament blood. This is a provincial train station. Chonburi, she guesses, or Rayong.
There is an oncoming train.
She’s good at orienting herself. She mocked another instance that did not adequately protect herself against snipers. But in the moment of it, of meeting a threat that lies so far outside her normal risk model, she too is petrified. The train is not as fast as the mass transit in Krungthep. Yet it comes, inexorably, the sight of her in the middle of the tracks giving the operator no pause: either they cannot see her, or have been made to unsee. It comes.
Jirayu tastes her own blood in her mouth, smells on the wind the tang of rust and the richness of frying fish. A bird calls; somehow she hears it despite the train’s roar. The world at once comes into stark clarity, as though a tinted pane has been removed.
She reaches for the thing Gamayun gave her, worn around her throat. Such an innocuous-looking object, a cube made from a material as airy as volcanic rock. It hums as her grip tightens.
The train’s roar abruptly dies, replaced by total silence.
She is surrounded by crumbling walls, concrete cracked and steel reinforcement exposed like ribs. A bird nests at the tip of one outward-facing corner—this place has been in ruins for some time, and when she looks out she sees the fingerprints of combat all over the streets, the next high-rise over, the highways below. Shattered asphalt; vehicles reduced to shredded metal and fused engines; a building whose structure has become host to stagnant water, overgrown with duckweeds and lotuses. The air is exceedingly clean, not a tinge of exhaust or factory fumes. The anatomy of absence. This, then, is Krungthep struck by cataclysm, emptied of people and industry.
Then she hears it, the sound of a person in pain. The harsh breathing through teeth. The arrhythmic grunts thinly held back from rising into screams. And she knows who it is.
She walks quickly through rooms dappled by sunlight, past rusted furniture and shards of glass. Yvette is lying on what used to be a bed, her left leg a mass of mangled bone and meat. She groans. Her fingers dig into the ruined bedframe. A trail of gore marks where she has crawled across the floor.
“Yvette,” Jirayu says.
The instance looks up at her, grinning with a mouth tinted red. “You finally came. I sheltered in this timeline for a while, figuring it safe enough, but well—a ceiling collapsed on me. Not much structural integrity anymore.”
Cold grips her. “Are you—which one are you?”
“I’m from Penumbra Seven Stamen. Not native to here.” A gloved hand reaches out. “I’m so glad I get to see you again.”
A leather collar encircles this Yvette’s throat, and she knows without having to ask that another Jirayu put it there, or at least picked it out. She takes her wife’s hand, feels on it the dampness of earth. “Can you get help?”
“Probably. But I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d need a safe place to translate to. Had a—” Yvette coughs and gasps, and now Jirayu sees it, the spreading patch of blood in her abdomen. “A premonition. A dream. You were in danger, and if one of me is there to anchor one of you . . . ”
Jirayu lowers herself to the rotten mattress. The leg is bad enough, but it’s not the only injury. She does not touch the seeping gut wound, can already tell a bullet is embedded there. “I’m fine now. You go back to where you can get help. That’s an order, Yvette.”
Yvette’s fingers clench around hers. “You’ve got one of me with you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then she can have my share of you.” A sharply indrawn breath; she clutches at her stomach. “I don’t have a safe place to go back to; I came from a war zone and was inside a building in the process of being shelled. Sorry. I just wanted to see you one last time. Serve you one last time. Save you one last time. That is all I’ve ever been about.”
“Come with me,” Jirayu says, not even sure whether that is possible, how she can fit a second Yvette into Helix Three Corolla. “I’m taking you to a hospital.”
“Don’t think I have got that long left, and even the best doctors aren’t going to save me from this. Bit of a waste to take me with you only for me to fall into a coma, isn’t it?” Another rattling of air through the throat. “I’m lucky they didn’t get me in the lungs. Mightn’t have been able to wait for you then.”
“Yvette—”
“Remember when you first hired me? I said something to the tune of it being an honor to serve you. I was a miserable little shit back then—couldn’t stop being sarcastic for a minute—but I mean it now. It’s been an honor, Jirayu. You’re my light. Before you, I merely existed; after you, I started living. Every part of me belongs to you.”
“Go back,” Jirayu says, her voice a little high now, edged with both terror and contempt at her own inability to keep it bottled up; at this evidence that her control has begun to fray. “You can get first aid, a doctor, emergency anything.”
“Where I’m from is much worse than here. Trust me. I’ll die either way.” Calm, matter-of-fact. “Better dying for you then dying with no point. Where I came from, you were . . . you passed a long time ago. A toxic gas got us; you put your mask on me after I fell unconscious, and there was no spare. It left you with so much lung damage, you could barely breathe on your own after; walking hurt you, and every day you wasted away a little more. You went on a ventilator in this secure, underground hospital, and you didn’t last long. I’ve never forgiven myself for any of this. Well, now I get to pay it back.”
The words pouring out seem to sap the last of Yvette’s strength. She convulses around the gut wound, making a strangled noise into Jirayu’s arm.
“Please.” Yvette’s voice breaks. “I’ve been holding on for as long as I could. It hurts so much.”
End it, Jirayu. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with you longer. But this is it for me. The gun gifted to her at fourteen with its customized size, its bespoke grip, balanced for a girl not yet grown.
She has a firearm on her, of course, as does Yvette. She cannot choose, for a few seconds; in the end for practicality’s sake she draws the pistol from Yvette’s thigh holster. A sleek thing, slightly too large for her hands.
“You’re sure,” she says softly, as she did not to her mother. Too young then to ask the question that matters, too consumed by horror and crying too hard to talk. Hands steady, all the same, both then and now.
Yvette’s eyes squeeze shut. She opens them. Holds Jirayu’s gaze. “My life has been yours from the second we met. You’ve held it in your hands since. Take care of your Yvette. I know I—we—can get emotional.”
“That’s one of the things I like best about you.” She tastes dirt and blood as she kisses her wife’s brow. Then she presses the gun’s muzzle where her mouth has been. “Rest well, my hound. Until we meet again.”