The mattress shifts with another’s weight and for an instant Jirayu thinks she is home, that she is with her wife. That all is as it has ever been, time rewound back, the last year a nightmare fugue.
But her orientation is par excellence: in no time she remembers she’s in a hotel room—that is her preference when she buys a bed companion—and the person next to her is an escort, not Yvette. Perfectly pleasant on the eye: tightly corded shoulders, thick limbs, a hard stomach. Typically not the most common build to be found in sex workers, who lean toward voluptuous and dainty, long waterfalls of hair and waspish waists. Jirayu has a specific taste and the wealth to ensure that whatever she requires can be found.
She runs her fingers down the woman’s muscled back. Few things captivate her more than the landscape of a woman’s honed body. This one has been built inside a gym, for the aesthetic rather than hard use; in combat, this temporary lover would be deadweight.
The escort turns around and kisses her fingertips. “Good morning, Khun Jirayu. Shall I get us breakfast?”
“Yes.” She does not return the gesture: a demonstration of tenderness can be purchased, and expensive companions are practiced at it. That does not mean she will play along and pretend that she is enthralled by the ruse.
Jirayu doesn’t bother peering over her companion’s shoulder to monitor whether the most expensive menu items are being picked—the very rich are stingy with the littlest things; she’s seen it in her own clients, and prefers not to reproduce the behavior. For all she cares, her hired lover could order the hotel’s entire inventory of abalone, caviar, and luxury sake. She pushes herself up on the mounded pillows and turns on her phone, authenticating with a passcode; she’s rarely investigated by law enforcement anymore, but her leeriness of biometrics as an opsec risk remains. The device decrypts as it boots up.
Several messages from Noor, reporting that ey has nothing to complain about Ingvild’s reaction time and marksmanship. Almost as good a shot as you, ey adds. Not flattery on eir part; Jirayu’s mother began teaching her to shoot nearly as soon as she had sufficient motor control to hold a gun, cautioning her that an arms dealer who doesn’t know how to use her own goods is a dead person walking. Her mother tutored her in a great deal: how the world works, how to make numbers spin to your advantage, how to assess people and find their fulcrum. How to not only survive but to make great forces submit to you.
Her companion answers the door in a robe; room service wheels in a table. Jirayu’s hand is under the blanket, around the grip of a pistol. Old habits. The server does not turn out to be a hitman, and backs out of the suite peacefully enough.
Breakfast is toast and a selection of spreads, pandan, mango and passionfruit jams; a little heap of fluffy patongoh and a pot of condensed milk to go with it; congee. It is excellent—she chooses hotels with good chefs, and picks escorts who know her tastes. Over the meal, the woman makes competent small talk, asks if she’s seen the renovations at Siam Paragon or Asiatique. She has not: Jirayu doesn’t often go through commercial malls. Too crowded, and her too tempting a target. But aloud she says only, “I’ve just flown in from Singapore a few days ago. You’ll have to tell me if there’s anything good on the new floors.”
They part ways as morning turns into noon. Polite, simple. She enjoys the transactional nature of it, far better than picking up some girl in a bar, unvetted and with a thousand potential complications. And it is convenient to have carnal indulgence on her schedule. She’s lucked out, too. None of her temporary bedmates have ever professed that she is special, that spending time with her is like true love, that they would be just as overjoyed to eat her out for free. Honesty is a trait she values.
Her timetable presents her with an appointment on a non-public floor in the EmQuartier. A meeting with representatives of a Korean startup specializing in experimental anti-agathic therapy. Logical enough to come to her for investment: much of her wealth is in pharmaceutical companies, an industry made evergreen by rank exploitation. Occasionally she sits in on remote shareholder meetings and votes for patent waivers simply to incense. Most of her now-peers are unaware of her previous occupation, but she knows they would have reviled or at least felt uneasy around an arms-dealer, and it amuses her to rankle hypocrites. What she sold killed quickly, if not always cleanly; what they have stakes in kills slowly and dirtily by lack of access, by prices set beyond the reach of those who need life-saving medicine.
The startup’s products don’t interest her—Tatiana has promised her that Vector technology can extend her lifespan a long time, and if she wishes to live to two hundred that can be easily arranged. She has set aside time for the startup all the same; it’s as good as anything else to keep busy. No messages from Tatiana, no notification that another memento of Yvette’s has surfaced from the quantum sea in which the Vector dives and drags its net.
She calls for her car and security detail. Noor is still busy testing the new hire, but she and ey are not attached at the hip. It is a routine meeting, in any case. Traffic is light; most people in Krungthep use public transit.
Jirayu arrives early. She has no intention of going up there to wait, and so on a whim she stops at Yvette’s favorite bakery, picking up salted egg yolk goods: buns, croissants, macarons. Sometimes it helps, to eat food that her wife loved—loves. It staves off the intolerable injury of Yvette’s absence.
When she exits the bakery, she has—not an intuition, precisely. But a sense of familiarity, the way any animal can scent a coming storm. The shift in air pressure. The tautness that is impossible to name but which she knows, deep in her marrow, signifies the herald of—
The bodyguard to her right transmutes into a flower of gore just as she dives for the floor. Behind her, the glass storefront cracks. Pastry crumbles and disgorges their fillings.
Screams rise to a crescendo around her, the cacophony of a civilian crowd’s first exposure to that which they have hitherto only seen in entertainment. The distance of movie screens suddenly removed. Jirayu runs, using the throng as her cover.
“Madam,” one of her bodyguards begins in her earpiece. They cut short. A surprised croak that suggests they’ve just been taken out.
Gun in hand, she drops behind a marble column. No elevated points above her that might host a sniper. She thumbs a button on the earpiece that emergency-calls Noor. First ring, as always. “Code red,” she says, brusque.
“Which floor, boss?” Noor already has her location, the only person she allows to track her.
“Top floor.”
“Well. Good.” Eir breath rattles. “I’m coming with a helicopter and sending ground reinforcements. Stay alive.”
Ground reinforcements being those stationed at one of her armories not far from here. She has made a point to spread them out through the city, and she moves around within the safety net they provide. In the last year, she’s never had an occasion to make use. Now she does. What blooms in her stomach resembles euphoria more than panic. This is what she knows, the battlefield, the percussion of it—the knowledge that at any instant a public place may transform into a charnel house.
Jirayu makes her way upward, climbing the helix-shaped pathway that gives the building its unique silhouette, ignoring the stampede toward the elevators. For now they make it difficult to take aim at her, unless her assailants are planning to splatter the entire crowd, which is bad business in any era, with or without alien-enforced peace.
Yet soon the crowd will thin, and she’ll become a sitting duck. Briefly she wonders who it is, an old enemy from the past, someone who’s lost loved ones to a bloodbath that involved her and her bodyguards or her goods. There are a multitude of causes, the only certainty being that whoever commissioned this attack is well-heeled. She’s survived many attempts, but this is not a shootout—she is disadvantaged entirely: her own fault for growing lax, for not having had the area swept and scanned first. Complacency has killed more of her supplier peers than she could count, and now perhaps it will kill her, despite the Vector’s empty promises of protection.
A shot cracks the plaster and glass above her. Blood beats under her skin as debris rains down; her breathing is loud in her ears even as the cacophony recedes, the shoppers having nearly emptied from this floor. She has an idea of where the snipers would be located—they’re not typically mobile—but at the present she can do nothing about it. Noor will not reach her fast enough. Jirayu does not often think of giving up, of conceding the fight. But for the first time since Yvette vanished, she’s met with the gnawing surety that she’s unable to affect the outcome, that she is helpless. That all her life of mortality confronted and denied over and over again has amounted to the finale where she dies like a dumb animal. Roadkill and no better.
The light goes out. Her earpiece beeps, alerting her that it has lost connection.
Her enemies, comes her first thought. Except no: if they’re capable of not only cutting the power but cellular signal, she’d have been dead the moment she disembarked from her car. They wouldn’t have waited until she was among crowds to shoot at her—the logic does not bear out, not even as a power play. Already their chosen method has lost them many precious minutes, during which she’s been able to move and take cover, and they’re not doing it as a cat playing with a mouse. The latest shot was imprecise, entire meters over her head, not missing on purpose. A sniper meaning to strike fear into her would’ve aimed much closer to her face. The terrain, such as it is, has favored her.
She breathes deeply. She crawls forward on broken glass and shards of architecture. Her hands will bleed and later—if there’s a later—there will be an encounter with forceps, first aid in the helicopter as Noor picks flecks of material out of her skin. For the moment she does not feel the pain, driven onward by adrenaline’s siren song. Acutely alive, perhaps minutes before she dies. It is so quiet, now. Civilians have escaped to the ground floor. A few might still be hiding in crevices like her, in staff rooms and toilets.
A hand closes on her shoulder. Jirayu jerks away, every coiled muscle drawing tauter as she scrambles on her knees. Pieces of cement crunch under the new arrival’s weight. She is leveling her gun, finger on the trigger, when the person says, “Jirayu, it’s me.”
All of her turns to ice, and then to water. The inversion of reality. The impossible reaching the threshold at which it can, must, happen—a mathematical certainty, a calculation at last finding its terminus. She would know this voice anywhere. And then the scent too reaches her, the cologne, oodh and saffron. “Yvette.” Her voice is flat, dead even: too much to feel or express.
“Yes. My lady.” The play at chivalry that Yvette sometimes veered—veers—into, an artifact of her reading too many fantasy stories. A long-fingered hand takes Jirayu’s. “Come on. Do you want me to carry you?”
“I can walk.”
And it is trust, to abandon cover despite knowing snipers are still about, to follow in the dark someone she cannot even see because this person feels right, sounds right, smells right. Because if this is an illusion—an imposter—then it has been put together with such authenticity that Jirayu cannot tell the difference. Even the way her fingers fit against Yvette’s is just as she recalls. Nothing has changed. The knowledge is basal: this is her wife.
A creak of metal and then they’re in a fire exit, mentholated neon above them, stairs spilling downward like katabasis. The air reeks of damp concrete, unventilated and close.
Jirayu looks and looks, drinking down the sight of what stands before her, the sight as familiar as her own reflection. She brings her hand to Yvette’s face, tracing it until her blood smears on the sculpted cheeks, the cut-glass jawline, the pointed nose. Those long eyelashes tickle her thumb. “It’s really you.” Her wife. Her most prized possession. The only one in the world she’ll move the earth and sky to regain. Despite everything—the inauspicious occasion, the smell, her own blood—she smiles: a hunter’s grin. “I knew you’d come back to me.”
“Your hound, here to defend you. Same as always.” Yvette leans down, kissing her hand quickly. “I should explain everything, but I can’t yet. Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
Her wife is wearing body armor—it is not any kind Jirayu has ever seen, and she’s seen the gamut, from the crudest makeshift approximations to the slickest industrial design. This appears to be carapace, every centimeter covered in gleaming black. It adds bulk, the same as any tactical gear, but it contours uncommonly to the body, unusually supple. The haute couture of combat wear, an ensemble in which the wearer can move like a knife, between the catwalk and a scene of enormous violence.
Yvette holds up her arm; light runs along it in strange, dichroic whorls. “You’ve had contact with the Vector?”
“They were the ones who said they could find you—”
Yvette’s expression shutters. “No. They didn’t find me. Don’t believe a single word they say unless you run into a creature called Gamayun, and don’t tell the Vector I’m back, please. I must be your secret. Where’s your evac point?”
“The roof.” She pauses. “The power and signal cutting, was it them or you?”
“Me.” Her wife does not elaborate, simply takes point as they mount the steps; even the gun in her hand resembles no sidearm Jirayu has ever seen or used. Something about its shape makes her think of sharks. Their footfalls echo. From very far down, someone screams—a noise of bodies thudding, fire doors creaking and swinging. No footsteps. Whatever is happening down there, no one is pursuing them upward.
At the exit to the roof, Jirayu’s earpiece finally hums: back online. She calls Noor, who reports that the helicopter is nearly here, that the roof is surprisingly clear—no ambush, no snipers. Turning to Yvette she says, “On your knee, Yvette.”
Her wife obeys, heedless of the filthy ground. She rests her head against Jirayu’s stomach, an old familiar gesture, the mistress and the hound. She says nothing at all, her breath pulsing against Jirayu’s skin.
“You’ll come back to me again,” Jirayu says. “No matter what.”
“All that I am is made for you.” Another kiss on her fingertips, exact and proper. “See you again soon.”
They disengage. Yvette holds open the heavy door for her, courtly to the last. Jirayu steps through, one careful pace at a time. The helicopter is descending, all the force of its presence, the scream of its blades and the currents of its torque.
By the time it lands, Yvette is long gone.
This is how you watch yourself die a thousand times, and your beloved nearly as many:
In one branch, far from the root and the shining beacon of my native timeline, a permutation of me perishes in a burst of fire and shrapnel. Jirayu survives that one.
In another, we die together on one of her private planes, so subtly rigged that nobody detects the explosives until it’s too late. I attend the joint funeral, against good sense, because I cannot stop myself. That there were other mourners surprised me, but Jirayu has—had—her allies; she was liked for her cunning, if not necessarily adored. There may even be a branch where she pursues a different life, and there she is loved by many, where she has friends and family in the way of ordinary people. Where she leads a life of quiet peace. I’ve not yet found that one.
But I slip between tenses, between these unstable indicators of temporality, the puncture-points at which language fails. The past is the present is the future. Time marches at a different rate, specific to each branch.
There are a hundred ways for us to break, a thousand ways for us to end. They have killed me so many times to create the yawning absence; they have killed her so many times to limit where I can appear, in which timelines I am anchored by the factor of Jirayu. There is an exacting calculus to this, understandable only to the Vector and perhaps the Bulwark—the mathematics have never been made privy to me, they are obfuscated even by my most benevolent helper. Why must I appear in this timeline and not another? Why us in particular, when there must be other bonded pairs? (But then, perhaps other lovers are being sundered just the same, their losses and disappearances charted in real time by an alien computer—I cannot chase their tragedies. All I’m able to do is track us across the lines of what remains possible, the branches that have not yet been pruned of us.)
This branch is designated Helix Three Corolla. A middling thing, not far or near the root, by all appearances ordinary. Here the Vector arrived only one year ago instead of twenty or a hundred; the changes they sew into the world have been minimal. That allows me to evade Vector surveillance that would otherwise be omnipresent, in the form of bots as small as mosquitoes, eyes embedded in the walls and ears in the thresholds of doors. I’ve always avoided what my Bulwark handler Gamayun singles out as timelines where the Vector has taken deep roots, has annexed the sky itself. This Krungthep is at once familiar and removed from the version in my native Comet One Nucleus. (How odd to identify myself by the designation of timelines over the designation of country, but I have no regard for my homeland, and it does not occupy my mind often.)
The old factory I’m using as my hideout is disused, the roof rusted and the structure ridden with mold. Few amenities to speak of, though there is a public pool nearby and thus showers I can access to make sure I don’t stink when I see Jirayu again (a trivial concern; one that I think about all the same—I think about her so much, so much—but I’m distracting myself).
Still, I’ve slept under worse. I unpack my things from what looks on the outside like an ordinary backpack. In actuality, it holds more than it has any right to. The contents: a spare suit of armor, cases of ammunition and defensive drones that operate on near-field signals, first-aid kits. An all-purpose jammer that’ll work against conventional radio and electronic devices. Clothes that’ll let me blend in. Off-the-rack button-up and dove-gray jeans, far less polished than what Jirayu prefers on me, but I want to draw as little attention as possible. Sneakers of no particular quality complete the ensemble. I fold away the armor into a compact little oblong, and put that away. I will look like a tourist, unremarkable next to the rest.
What I do not yet have: a compass that will point me home once I’ve secured Jirayu.
Translating here with Gamayun’s help was simple. The Bulwark and Vector are equally matched in many ways, including the speed and accuracy of their calibrations. Each time I make a crossing, I’d be given a new stabilizer that guides my next translation, without direct contact with Gamayun: minimizing opsec risk. The plan is for me to take Jirayu, then jump to several other branches, staying at each long enough for our wake to fade. Then a final step, back to Comet One Nucleus—the Bulwark’s stronghold. Not the most direct of sequences, yet grimly necessary. It won’t be easy, Gamayun warned me, the Vector will be invested in capturing you alive, stranding you there, interrogating and suborning you. They will use you to find One Nucleus and strike at us.
I leave the factory, ensuring as I do that I have no tails, no second shadow. The soi is quiet. Few residences, and of those they’re ramshackle, corrugated iron sheets held together by desperation and poverty. The Vector promises paradise wherever they arrive, but they never eradicate inequality completely—all they care about is their cognates, sifted out and uplifted from adverse circumstances; the rest of humanity can go hang. Meanwhile the Bulwark promises nothing, hiding themselves, reaching out only to cognates they can use. More straightforward. Butchers befriending the pigs in their pens are risible; give me an honest monster any time.
What I should do is ask more questions about the war between the Bulwark and the Vector, these two competing factions of the same extraterrestrial species. Jirayu would be interested—the casus belli of any strife has always fascinated her—but for me it’s the tangible objective that counts, the result of my personal actions. I can no more affect the alien civil war than I can affect the direction of the tides.
You never think big, Jirayu used to tell me, amused.
I don’t. That’s why I like being your dog. Gives me all the joy in the world.
The simple fact is that I was never built to bear the weight of losing her. I thought myself strong, a survivor. Yet I could not—did not want to—survive her death; she had shifted my center of gravity that much, had altered my systems so deeply that my cardiac arrangement moved for her, my lungs drew and spent for her alone. And then Gamayun appeared before me as I cradled her corpse; they whispered, Somewhere, this went differently, or will go differently. You have the power to shift this outcome. Would you like to try again?
It is cool here in Three Corolla, several degrees lower than I’d expect. When I stop at the public pool, the shower is icy. Not that it matters. The implants and enhancements I received under Gamayun’s watch mute most discomfort with temperature, among other perks. It was several long operations, during all of which I was put under, but at that point I didn’t care whether I lived. Jirayu was gone from the world. Gamayun sat at my bedside in their puppet-horror body and explained to me the truth of the universe. Or the version that they wanted me to believe, at any rate.
Several train rides and a ferry take me where I want to be. Public transport was never the first choice for Jirayu for security reasons. On my own, I enjoy it. There’s a comfort in disappearing into a crowd, into becoming merely another face rather than one of her highly recognizable defenders. She has a sort of uniform for us; we wear her colors in our suits—heavy on oxblood and black, the occasional alabaster to relieve it. I like them because they belong to her, but sometimes I also like a throwback to the time before I came into her possession. Brief absence makes returning to her all the more satisfying.
Until the final, irrevocable absence. I try not to think about that. I’ve come here; I’ve found her. This is what matters, the version of her that breathes. The version that I will not fail.
The Grand Palace is not so different from what I know, just a few buildings shifted in location, a few wall murals that look more saturated than what I remember. I blend in as much as any other foreign visitors. Silver stupas, golden roofs, countless jeweled giants guarding stairs and walkways. There’s a timeless peace to their shadows. The first time I saw this place I found it unthinkably alien in its beauty, as far removed from my native America as could possibly be, a well-preserved splendor that emanates history from every stone. In that way, too, a diametric opposite to my country, that former empire which despite its wealth never had much of a history, much of an identity. All we had was guns and white supremacy. But then my recall is of necessity distorted. I was born into ruin and wreckage, and what I know of America’s heyday is oral tradition.
(Tattered textbooks, yes, full of dubious glosses. Jirayu once showed me history texts about my homeland printed and distributed in the rest of the world. The substance in them is much different from what I found in old libraries in Pennsylvania, in Maine, in the places I passed through as I scrabbled to grow up. A childhood with a roving warband. Mercenary, really. It’s a wonder Jirayu could ever manage to train me into something human, something civilized. I liked to joke that she was putting a bespoke suit on a feral mutt; I’ll always be defined by my teeth.)
I go through the bright-painted loggias, the museum, the gift shops. It is in this last category that I look for my dead drop, courtesy of Gamayun. They never put things in quite the same place—last time it was in a modern art gallery far from here, the other time it was in a Klong Ong Ang aromatherapy boutique. The object is always unmissable, immediately visible to me because like me it is a thing that does not belong, a piece ferried here from another timeline. Usually it looks like a black cube or pyramid no larger than my little finger. Sometimes a cylinder. The way it thrums, activating under my touch, is never mistakable.
The first gift shop doesn’t yield anything, but there are several more. I take my time in each, leafing through postcards, laminated art prints, costume jewelry, and miniature palaces. The attendants are too bored to bother me in any case. It is in the last gift shop that I finally have to admit I’m not going to find it, that Gamayun has failed to keep up their end of the bargain this time or—worse—that enemy action has occurred, and the compass that’ll guide me to the next branch has been stolen.
I exit the shop, find a nice tree under which to sit and think. They did warn me this might happen. Panic picks at the seams of my self-control, but I’ve gone through much worse, in my childhood and adulthood alike. There will be another way, a spare. Gamayun will approach, or send a secret message. They are invested in my finding Jirayu—or in my shuttling across the branches—for reasons they will not disclose. But for now I’m stranded; for now, I cannot take hold of my other half—the woman who owns me body and soul—and translate, and bring her to safety.
For now, I need to survive and defend her without drawing Vector notice.