38.

16^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE GRAND LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Umiko Haroda petted the macaque Fabricated perched beside her, wanting more than anything to get off the roof of the Grand Library and back to her bed. But she’d made a promise to Rowena Downshire— a promise that made no sense, had been demanded through a note delivered through the vacuum tubes to the Indexer room, and required her to forgo her sleeping mat long after dark.

But it was a promise, all the same.

“Did you bring it?”

Rowena clambered up the fire stairs lacing the side of the building.

Umiko rolled her eyes. “‘Bring the messenger we’ve been using,’ your note said, so yes. I brought it. I thought Reverend Chalmers wouldn’t have another packet for your translator before—”

Rowena dashed up to the macaque and opened the cylinder in its right forearm—or tried to, jabbing at its seams, poking and cursing.

“Wait, you’re going to break it,” Umiko complained. She batted Rowe-na’s hands aside, then put out her own. “What’s that note? Give it to me.”

“I don’t want—”

“To trust me? Too late for that. Or don’t you want me to help you?” She wagged her empty hand again. “What’s gotten into you? You look like you’re about to come out of your skin.”

The edge of the roof was a picture frame of bioluminescent vines. In their wan, green light, Rowena’s face had turned to ash.

“We’re leaving in two days,” she blurted. “I tried to get them to leave tonight, but they said that’s too suspicious and they need time to sort things properly here.”

Umiko blinked. “Leaving? Why? Where?”

“Vladivostoy. I just . . . I have to let somebody know we en’t forgotten her, in the meantime.”

Umiko had been about to object again, but Rowena silenced her with the note. She unrolled the paper and scanned its hasty, childish scrawl.

16^th Eightmonth

To: Dr. Wyndham, Mercy Commission Home, Southeby, Amidon

From: R. Downshire, Kyo-Tokai, Nippon

Re: Mrs. Downshire

Found your messages to D.T. and we’re coming after her because nobody said she could take her and don’t worry about anything because once we’re done Bishop Meteron will wish he never—

It went on in a blur of poorly spelled, only loosely grammatical phrases. Umiko stopped reading. “Rowena, what is this?”

“The Bishop took my mother. Her doctor’s losing his mind with worry and stupid Bear and Ann and Doc say we can’t just go now but I have to tell someone we’re going to fix this. I need somebody to know I’m trying.”

“You want to use the Fabricated you’ve been sending packets to your translator with to take this to a galvano-graph station?”

“You can do that, can’t you? Reprogram it?”

“Rowena, this spark isn’t even coded. Anybody could read it.”

She threw her hands up in wild frustration. “Of course it isn’t coded! Wyndham’s just some stupid medical doc trying to take care of cracked old ladies! He’s not a spy or a campaigner or anything like we are!”

The moment the last of the words came out, Rowena’s mouth snapped shut, her teeth clicking so hard, Umiko herself winced. They stared at each other in silence for a long, awkward moment.

“You told me enough already,” Umiko whispered. “I kind of figured that part out for myself.”

“I can’t wait two days,” moaned Rowena. “We’re already such a long way from Vladivostoy. Anything could be happening to her!”

And then she was up and pacing, hugging herself, teeth chattering. It wasn’t cold. Umiko sweated beneath her sash and skirts. Rowena’s useless, cornered animal energy ran her like a clockwork.

“If you could be just a little patient, I’m sure—”

“I was patient for seven years,” Rowena cried. “I worked and stole and begged for every clink I could get, just to get her free, just to know she’d be safe, and then finally she was! And now that’s gone and I don’t even know for sure how to find her.”

Umiko stuffed the aborted spark into a pocket of her sash and stood. If only she could get Rowena to calm down, to stop looking at her as if she’d seen something terrifying.

A chill poured down Umiko’s spine, running like ice water. The roof seemed darker than it had a moment before. Rowena’s eyes fixed on her, then trailed past. Umiko turned, certain of something wrong in the bleeding darkness behind her.

The vines outlining the roof’s gabled edges had shriveled, coiling into blackened snakes, leaves hissing. Something was coming up the building, not from the fire stairs, but from its very face, rising like a wall of green flame. It smelled dank and briny, like the lanyani boatmen on the canals.

But so much bigger.

Umiko screamed.

Rowena rushed forward, stepping between the monstrous tangle of greenery and Umiko. One hand disappeared into her kimono, and then flashed out, the bright tip of a sword arcing through the moonlight.

A long, mossy beard of greenery fell from the thing, sliced clean through. It reared up, flailing, screeching. Umiko scrambled back, covering her ears. Rowena shouted something at her. She pointed to the fire ladder, but Umiko couldn’t hear, and the roof was so dark, and what would she do if something else rose up from its shadows?

The monster—some kind of lanyani, impossibly vast and formless— braided itself into a many-legged thing, a centipede’s nightmare. It skit-tered forward. Rowena rolled to the side, luring its mandibled jaws away as they snapped and oozed. It crashed through the Fabricated monkey, trampling it in pursuit of her.

Umiko didn’t know when she’d stopped screaming. She stood rooted to the spot, watching Rowena dart and dive, slashing and sparking at the creature, crisping its limbs with jolts of electricity from her sword’s curious tip. Then it surged over her, a wave of kelp and rot, wrapping around Rowena until she disappeared like a mouse down an adder’s belly.

Umiko snatched a broken copper plate off the twisted Fabricated’s body, hurling it at the horrible thing. The scrap veered wide, but what passed for the lanyani’s face still turned toward her, a dozen blank, fathomless eyes glaring murder.

Then the creature spasmed. A long, metal point appeared in its belly, tearing a ragged hole. The lanyani shrieked, bucking, and Rowena spilled forth in a gush of salty ooze. Gasping for air, she had barely gained her feet before the beast spun on its many legs again, its underside already knitting in a long, withered scar.

Rowena swiped at the two coiled limbs lashing toward her, slicing off the one bound for her neck. Another hooked in her kimono sleeve. She pulled the knot of her sash and shrugged free, scampering back, stripped of everything but her juban undershirt. The lanyani shredded the abandoned kimono, chittering rage.

“Run!” Rowena shouted, waving Umiko away. “Go!”

Umiko turned and collided with someone twice her size.

The Alchemist—the one Rowena called the Old Bear—stood bare-chested in his britches, a strange pistol in his right hand. He shoved Umiko aside. “Rowena!”

Her eyes found his. She leaped away in time to avoid the creature’s next lunge, and the Alchemist’s flare fired into its face.

The lanyani must have come from the waters, sodden as it was, and yet it burned, a gel spreading across its fibrous, braided body. A choking black cloud plumed from it, spitting like a grease fire, until the beast finally crumpled in on itself, twitching and burning under something other than flame.

Rowena stood a few yards from Umiko, panting with her hands braced on her knees. Her saber lay at her feet. It looked strangely shorter than it had only moments before. She looked up to say something, but Umiko never caught the words.

The Alchemist moved between them, taking Umiko’s chin and forcing her to meet his gaze.

He said something then, in his deep, urgent voice—something about remembering. No, about . . . not remembering. About going to bed. About Umiko needing her rest.

He was right, of course. Creator only knew how late it was. And repairing her Fabricated was no small task, come morning.

Umiko gathered the monkey up, glad it was still in three mostly solid bits, and strode for the fire stairs. The city smog seemed far worse than usual, reeking and oily in a way she associated more with Amidon than pure, intellectual Nippon. She thought she heard a shrill voice calling after her. Then again, it might have been the wind.

When dawn finally came, Umiko awoke in her own bedroll, rested and unconcerned.

She might have gone the whole day like that if, while preparing for her bath, she hadn’t found a crumpled galvano-graph message stuffed behind her sash.

The memories came flooding back with it.