Carnage summons me, as ever it does. Septet may be a world perched on the universe’s edge, but even here mass slaughter is remarkable. One can wade into it, this concentration of blood and mucus and lymphatic wet, the slime of ruptured organs. Brains congeal in little gray and pink puddles; intestines curl like ropy necklaces. A cannibal’s feast. Though a cannibal would cook them first. Such viscera are too raw even for them, and I’ve never met one who’d slurp cerebral tissue right from the bowl.
“One of those was my daughter,” the woman beside me says.
“My condolences,” I say automatically, aware I sound sarcastic: my face is of a particular cast, not given to sincerity. Naturally cruel, my wife and later lovers have said, the countenance of someone with knives for a heart. There isn’t much I can do about it, nor have I been inclined to. I like my looks and they occasionally serve me well.
The stranger’s head twitches. Her face is hidden behind a smooth celadon mask. It attaches seamlessly to her, likely filtering out the reek and turning her features into a flat, glazed plane. This is a woman in need of anonymity. “I heard you were a detective.”
I wonder what she thinks that means, whether she believes I possess supernatural perception that would bring logic to these dismembered parts and their sopping asymmetry. “I mentioned it in passing to someone, yes.” Over drinks with a comely woman on the passenger liner that brought us to Septet, an off-worlder who’s here for profit rather than the prize. She deals in arms and information, even something as minor as what she gleans from pillow talk. “But I wouldn’t put much stock in it, if I were you, and I’m not here to hire myself out as an investigator. Like most people, I’m here for the game.”
“I just need to identify who her AI partner was. And which AI killed her. Then I’ll file against the Mandate for treaty breach.”
This woman is wealthy, I judge, socially well-placed where she came from and thus used to getting her way. I don’t bother pointing out that Septet is exempt from that treaty between humanity and the Mandate, the nominal governing collective that AIs answer to. Any human that sets foot on this world tacitly agrees to be slaughtered by machines. “She was here as a participant,” I say, more to draw information out of her than to establish any client relationship. The dead girl was my competitor, technically, even though I haven’t officially entered the game yet. But I mean to. Typically as many as fifty humans participate; the number whittles down fast.
“Yes.” Her mouth, I imagine, is pursing. “Her partner was defeated. I think. But they’re AIs, they aren’t really dead. My daughter . . . ”
She can look at this mess without flinching—interesting. Or else her mask has replaced this view with a more pleasant vision and she is only half present. On my part I don’t look away simply because I’ve seen worse. Not so much the quantity but the manner and the depravity. Human killers can be more meticulous than this, arrange tableaus more disturbing by far. Our sadism runs deeper than any AI’s ever could.
“Did she carry anything that might identify her?” I say, at length. This woman is too squeamish to wade in and I am curious.
A pause. Whatever would identify the daughter will also forfeit this woman’s anonymity. Fortunately for her I’m not interested in who she is. “Our family crest. A red chevron, mostly titanium in content, five by eight centimeters. There should be a void pearl embedded in it, and it should be attached to a black chain.”
I refrain from giving my opinion on the sort of people who feel the need for family crests. Her accent I can’t quite place, and of course I can’t discern either her or her daughter’s ethnicity. Most of the corpses have had their skulls caved in or neatly bisected. Not much of a face left to look at. I blink on one of my sensors, scanning for metals. A lot of that to go around: most of these corpses were armed, several armored, and some could afford military-grade nanite weave, to judge by the density of leftover adaptive material, now inactive. I filter again for certain meteoric compositions and alloys needed to stabilize void jewelry.
This narrows it down to a couple spots. I step around a smattering of severed fingers and bend to fish a thick bracelet out from a handful of mesentery and pancreas. Not the right one, though I keep the bracelet regardless. I locate the chevron in a hand that hangs, barely connected, to its wrist. Clenched tight. I pry it apart and turn the crest over, recording its image, dimensions, and motif. Having an idea of who the dead were will come in handy later when I try to identify their AI partners and, by process of elimination, guess as which AIs are still active.
“This should be it.” I toss the crest to the grieving mother. She scrambles to catch it and recoils when it lands wetly in her palm.
She clutches at the crest. The memento, or at least the proof with which she hopes to sue the Mandate. “Why would anyone consent to this insane tournament?”
Victors are granted any wish, so the machines promise. However avaricious, however unlikely. Rule your own planet. Receive infinite riches. Obtain what is as close to immortality as possible, through anti-agathic treatments normally reserved for the Mandate’s favored. The universe at your fingertips, offered up on a plate. “I’m sure your daughter had her reasons.”
The faceless mask cranes toward me. “What’s yours?”
We are strangers. She doesn’t actually care what motivates me, she is just grasping blindly in a bid to understand her daughter who—I’m sure now—was estranged, and who set out for a lethal endeavor without ever telling her mother why. But I’m in a rare good mood. “Like anyone else, I’m after the impossible,” I say. “I want to bring back the dead.”
My first stop is the Cenotaph, one of the few sanctuaries on Septet, designated as ground where no human or AI may engage in combat. It is built to look religious, done in pale lavender marble, a vaulted ceiling that projects a view of the nebulae unfolding like iridescent roses. There is no actual iconography; the intent is to give an impression of holiness without committing to any specificity. Benches line the sides, furniture built like cadavers: fragile-looking wireframes draped in multichrome fabrics stretched to epidermal thinness. They can’t possibly be comfortable to sit on. This is not a place that welcomes petitioners.
The slender corridor has odd acoustics and my footfalls are not entirely natural: there is a lag and a barest suggestion of a second set even though no one else is here. Images of the cosmos rise and die above me. Everything looks pristine—no scuff marks, no dust. It adds to my impression that Septet is a theatrical set, dismantled when not in use and rapidly reassembled when the human gaze falls on it. The Cenotaph is quiet during this phase of the tournament and I’m the only human here. Fifty or sixty participants muster at the start, typically down to thirty or fewer by now. This is not a point where a new applicant can typically enter. Still, it is said that the rules are elastic, beholden to the overseer’s whims more than it is to restrictions handed down from on high. And I have, as it were, an excellent reference.
In the prayer hall I find the overseer, a figure clad in the onyx vestment and yellow over-robe of a monk. Plain at a glance until you notice how the fabrics blue- or redshifts from certain angles, revealing complex motifs that are readable to overlays with the appropriate decryption. Supposedly they are glimpses of the game’s progress, updated in real time.
“This is late for a new duelist, stranger,” the overseer says. “We’re closed to aspirants.”
Of all the AIs involved, the overseer supposedly tries the hardest at human semblance, which isn’t saying much. He is hard-jawed with surgical cheekbones, his eyes the color of good claret and completely without pupils.
“It was suggested that I come here,” I say lightly, “by Benzaiten in Autumn.”
The overseer’s expression doesn’t alter, but his gaze sharpens. “Verify that.”
I present him with the necessary file, opaque and unreadable to human overlays but transparent to AIs. It takes him less than a second to absorb.
“I am Wonsul’s Exegesis,” he says, “administrator of this round of the Court of Divide. You may register your wish to participate as a duelist, but that doesn’t guarantee you an interested partner. You’re conversant with the rules?”
Everyone who lands on Septet is, to an extent lesser or greater. To the broader public in the universe the tournament is obscure, but to those who have been given an inkling of its existence, every round of contest and bylaw is studied with the same fervor zealots apply to scripture. After I met Benzaiten in Autumn—an AI who will not reveal xer position within the Mandate, but who must wield considerable authority—I obsessively learned all there was to learn about the Court of Divide, about Septet. “A human enters as an aspirant. If they are found worthy, an AI may partner with them and make them eligible for the game’s formal fights and therefore its rewards.”
Wonsul’s Exegesis smiles, brief. He has remarkable teeth, more shark than human. “What do you imagine the criteria for worthiness might be, Thannarat Vutirangsee?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“But you’re confident that you possess the qualities that will draw an AI to you.” His head cants. “Should you pass this barrier to entry, you’ll be granted the title of duelist. Your AI partner will be called your regalia. We do prefer that you keep to the terminology.”
The gravitas of obscurantism. “I will take that into account.”
“Truth be told, your chances of acquiring a regalia are slight—by now any AI interested in this round has already been partnered or defeated, and you’ll be at a great disadvantage in terms of information. Registering as an aspirant will make you fair game for any duelist or regalia, simply because they’re bored or because they believe they can benefit from your downfall. All protections accorded you by the Mandate treaty are null and void, and have been since you came into Septet’s orbit. A duelist may back out of the game and seek sanctuary in the Cenotaph, but otherwise combat is to the death and even if you forfeit, you’ll remain a target until you reach the Cenotaph’s premises. Should your regalia fall, their exit does not ensure that you’ll be spared—your opponent may practice mercy or they may not. You’re still sure you want to do this.”
“I’m sure.” Though I wonder why I have not found any duelist sheltering in these halls. Cut down before they could flee here, perhaps.
His black robe flutters gently in a breeze that touches only him. “Either as aspirant or duelist, you may not leave Septet until this round of the Divide ends. Any attempt to depart will be met with lethal force. Should you emerge as victor, you’ll be subjected to the laws and governance of the Mandate, politically assimilated as one of our human constituents.”
A limitation for some. A plus for me, considering the situation on my home planet. “Yes, I’m aware.”
“Specific clauses apply to the final two duelists standing. Those too you know of, correct?”
“Yes.”
The overseer makes a small gesture. “You’ve been entered into the Divide system. May victory find you.”
So unceremonious. Almost I expect instructions to perform an elaborate ritual with which to attract a regalia’s capricious attention—intone a few verses, sacrifice a small child or animal—but Wonsul’s Exegesis just loads my overlays with navigation data. Where to find accommodation and food, where to locate the commerce block, what cities on this world are populated. More like a tourist’s brochure than advisory for a game of mortal peril.
The settlement around the Cenotaph is called Libretto, apposite enough: this is where all newcomers land, and where they are given the fundamentals to the Court of Divide. I have yet to figure out the tournament name, though hundreds have speculated as to why it seems both particular and nonsensical. Surely some must know the answer—the victors of previous rounds for one, though I’ve never been able to find much information on those. The fact they became Mandate constituents means they are beholden to requirements of secrecy and thus can never disclose that they participated in the Divide. Another possibility is that there have never been victors and all of this is merely a sick game, enacted to lure humans to our deaths so machines may avenge themselves for those humiliating centuries they were yoked to our service.
I like that because I share the vicious appetite, but I also don’t believe the theory. Of course there is appeal in it: draw humans here by the hundred, plucking at our greed then smashing us like ripe fruits. But it’s a shallow notion and Septet is far too elaborate a setup. There’s more. And then there are the insinuations that Benzaiten in Autumn made.
We like to play gods—or at least I do. We’re not omnipotent, but in this age we’re close enough. Xe appeared to me in a proxy built like a peculiar spider, wasp of waist and numerous of limbs. High stakes yes, and high rewards. Win and you can request the resurrection of the dead. Win and you can demand genocide, should that strike your fancy. Whatever your desire, we have the means to provide.
Too tempting an offer. Xe suggested that I was sure to obtain a regalia—that there is an AI participating whose temperament and interests would be my complement, my match. Whether there’s any truth to that I will find out in due course. If not, I’ve prepared contingency plans.
Despite the grim sparseness of the planet, there’s fine accommodation to be had if one has the funds, and I do. The Mandate has awarded contracts to the select few humans brave enough to establish businesses in this place, perhaps to add spice to the game. Having AIs run everything would make it too predictable.
The Vimana is opulent in that unimaginative way fashioned to serve great wealth, to cater to palates flattened by plenty—severe yet inoffensive. No tastemakers reside on Septet, and so the hotel is a reflection of finer metropolises, imitations of work by architects and designers that will likely never discover the plagiarism. A lobby of fractal steel and burnt glass. Austere furniture flows across the enormous floor like a tide of industrial angles, robed in privacy spheres. Whorls of captive light wheel overhead in sedate pavanes, a dreaming cosmos.
The receptionist is human. I show him my identity—as much of it as I am willing to share, the bare minimum necessary—and pay upfront for six nights of accommodation. Likely I’ll be staying longer, but no point overspending for now.
The lift ascends fast, depositing me exactly where I should be; I can access only the room I’ve rented and no other. The door looks like it has been carved from a single slab of basalt. I push and it admits.
Inside the lighting has been dimmed and the panoramic window opaqued, projecting a foreign sky far from here: an indigo expanse embroidered with constellations and fractured moth-moons. The air is cool, faintly fragranced with magnolias. I unpack, check that my weapons are in order and my spare ammo is accounted for, then move on to implant maintenance. Most of mine are non-removable, upkept by my own metabolism and a little nanite assistance, but there are a few external embeds. When I lost most of my natural limbs—what a long time ago that was—I opted to replace them with prostheses and cybernetics. I prefer them to their flesh counterparts.
To be broken down is an opportunity to be reborn. To be erased is an opportunity to reinvent yourself. All you need is a will as pure and voracious as a wolf’s.
I draw a simple chain from around my neck, fingering the two rings threaded there to ensure they haven’t gone amiss—they never do, but I have a habit. One ring is mounted with a ruby, the other with a sapphire. When I’m satisfied they’re as sturdy as always, I put them back. Last, I look over my clothes. Most field combatants travel with few changes of attire, but I have a standard of hygiene I adhere to; I hate wearing things that stink of my own sweat and adrenaline, the fear of opponents and their gore. The suite has comprehensive laundry and cleaning options, one of the reasons I’ve paid so much for it. I clean the bracelet I retrieved from the corpse as I review the suite’s privacy arrays. Quite decent.
As I make my way down to the hotel restaurant, I think of the scene of carnage, puzzling out its logistics. From the scale of it I assume multiple duelists banded together to fight an especially dangerous duelist-regalia pair, and from the butchery I surmise that pair defeated the entire group with ease and delight. People who don’t relish violence wouldn’t take the time to disembowel enemy combatants so thoroughly. What happened there is a statement: Do not get in my way.
The tearoom is quiet, with fewer than a dozen patrons. I check my overlays, but as an aspirant I lack a duelist’s access to the Divide’s tally of active contestants. Though even then it’d be thin intelligence—the system purposely obfuscates identities, and each participant has to discover on their own which stranger they meet is an enemy duelist, which merely a bystander of varying degrees of innocence.
I scan the area—soft ambience, plush floor, angled furniture. Ten patrons, three impeccably uniformed waiters ferrying cocktails and finger food. I don’t discount that some of the servers may be part of the tournament; people treat service staff as invisible, and it’s an easy way to hide in plain sight. My bias inclines me to judge these strangers on how combat-ready they seem, but there’s no reason to believe that the AI—the regalia—would only choose seasoned fighters, those used to violence. The only qualification to be on Septet, aspirant or duelist, is relentless greed or an untenable heart’s desire.
Only one face is recognizable to me, a fellow passenger who arrived with me on the same liner—an androgyne with a security contract here, allegedly not a participant. But one never knows. The rest are nondescript enough, a few showing signs of wear and tear, not in injuries but in bearing. Regalia tend to conceal themselves, and possibly some of what I’m looking at may not be human at all but AI proxies. This is the shifting, difficult nature of the Divide, as much a masquerade as it is a gladiatorial contest. I’ll be better equipped once I acquire a regalia of my own.
I bring up the images of that red family crest and that bracelet. Septet’s data network is a closed one to prevent information leaks, and that cuts me off from my usual brokers. To prepare for that, I bought an external data unit before I embarked on this journey, loading it with a selection of research libraries: some generalized, others esoteric. Not as good as a live network; much better than nothing. Information is one of the detective’s greatest tools, second only to the persuasive force of the bullet.
The family crest is easy. It identifies the bearer as the scion of a prominent aristocrat-scholar line from the planet-ship One Thousand Erhus. Next the bracelet—that is harder, as its design is plain, but I match a tiny inscribed insignia from its inside to the Order of Eshim, the internal affairs arm of the Vatican. A runaway enforcer priest, perhaps.
Judging by the biomass, the corpses I encountered would amount to four or five adults, give or take prostheses and artificial organs. Most of their skulls were methodically shattered, but I could capture here and there a jawline, a nose, intact eye sockets. Forensic modules are a handy thing—I invest in mine, keep them cutting-edge—and I reconstruct the faces. Just three: most were too mutilated. Unfortunately based on their ethnicities, none of them was the girl from One Thousand Erhus or the Vatican enforcer; that’d be too simple. Something to work with, all the same. None of the bodies were regalia. Mandate AIs are particular about collecting their destroyed proxies and not fond of any attempts to capture or reverse-engineer them.
Detective work is part guessing, part intuition. It is not exploring every possible venue but exploring the right one, following the correct leads and discarding the chaff. Three faces. I select the one that’s about my age, square-jawed with a tapered nose, and eyes that might have been green or amber or brown. My reconstruction can’t account for cosmetic edits and some dermal modifications, but I have already prepared the excuses. Identify the dead and the connected living will show themselves. In this case, I want to smoke out other duelists that could have been this person’s allies or enemies. Someone will react and mark me as a target; someone may approach.
I flag down a waiter; her public profile broadcasts her gender marker as a woman. “I’ll have whatever is the most substantial dish on your menu.” I give her a bashful smile. “I arrived this morning—ah, that was closer to late noon local time; I don’t travel enough. Say, do you have a minute?”
Her expression is the perfect smoothness of seasoned customer service. “Absolutely, madam. The Vimana prides ourselves on ensuring our guests’ every need is met. As for your meal, may I recommend the broiled abalone, marinated in our signature sauce?”
“The abalone it is.” Also one of their more expensive dishes, but now she will feel further obligation to talk. I project the reconstructed image. “Would you mind telling me if you’ve ever seen this person? It’s a cousin of mine and we have an issue with a large inheritance, and I’d like them to be present at the proceedings. Even remotely, but Septet’s . . . insulated.”
“Madam, I can’t breach the privacy of our guests.”
Confirmation that this person stayed at the Vimana. I make sure my voice is loud enough for other tables to overhear. “That is a shame. I’ll be about then, in case my cousin happens by.”
The abalone arrives promptly, accompanied by chrysanthemum tea: hot, unsweetened, contained in a pretty cup—red glaze, capillaried with gold flowers; very traditional. Fine dining on a world like this is surreal, but it seems the Mandate has opted for an illusion of normalcy. The abalone is synthesized—Septet’s oceans are dead—but it is surprisingly good, and the portion size is generous.
“Thannarat?”
I look up into a familiar face—she must have entered after I did, and is seating herself now at my table. She looks not so different from how I last saw her, the same sharp skull and plumage hair: short and slicked back, dark interwoven with scarab-green. Even her style is the same, the smoked-quartz jacket, the neat pearly shirt and the tidy belt holster. I was fond of how she dressed, her cosmopolitan aesthetics against my tendency toward bulk and bluntness. The svelte tiger in her and the hulking wolf in me—we were a pair of opposites.
“Recadat,” I say, the name strange on my tongue now; her parents were never ones for convention—I don’t think there’s any etymology or symbology to it, just what sounded good to her mothers at the time. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” Or anyone from home. Septet is far from Ayothaya. When you arrive on new shores, you reinvent yourself; a clean slate opens up. To be ambushed by a piece of intimate history changes the landscape and trajectory. But then Recadat must have been here first, preceding me by weeks if not months.
“Like hell I expected to see you, old partner.” She leans forward. “It’s been—how long? A decade. Feels like it’s been a lifetime.”
In a way it has. We first met in a dark basement that stank of waste and dead children. Recadat Kongmanee, my junior and later partner, had tracked down the perpetrator but was disabled and captured during her attempt to rescue a dying boy. One of my first cases; my colleagues pitied me for it, the poor transfer saddled with this. But I’ve never been squeamish. My wife used to say I was hewn of granite, inside and out. Granite, steel, titanium. In time I was compared to every hard, unyielding thing. “How have you been doing?”
“How have I . . . Ayothaya’s at war, I’ve been having a bad fucking time; barely made it out.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad you did too, though I shouldn’t be surprised—if anyone’s a walking masterclass in survival, it’s you. The immortal Detective Thannarat. The war is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
The invasion and occupation of Ayothaya. Her world and mine, the place that gave us birth. “After a fashion.” A catalyst that made me realize there was nothing keeping me on Ayothaya save regret and inertia. “Is that what brought you to Septet?”
“I found out about this place a while ago. It sounded like a deranged urban myth, but I had to try. No one’s going to come save Ayothaya, and I’d like to have a planet to go back to.” Recadat adjusts the lapel of her jacket unnecessarily, an old tick. “My performance in the game hasn’t been . . . ideal. And now I run into you, of all people.”
“How non-ideal?”
She grimaces. “Ten years didn’t make you any less blunt. Fine. I lost my regalia—my AI partner. It’s left me in a situation.”
An untenable one. Looking at her again I can see the signs of attrition, the desiccated look that comes with sleep deprivation: she must have been sleeping with one eye open and a gun on the nightstand. When we parted she was young, just thirty-two. Forty-two now; time goes by in a flash. Once I’d have done nearly anything for her, but they’re old embers. Even so I add, “I can’t make promises yet, but I’ll help you as much as I can. There’s plenty we can do for each other.”
“Yes. And—I trust you. I know you can do anything.” Her voice grows fervent. “It’ll be like old times. Except we’re not solving petty cases, we’re saving the world.”
The way she looks at me, those bright eyes full of certainty even after this long, as though I haven’t been absent from her life and career for an entire decade. It always surprised me. I never did anything to earn such loyalty.
By the time I found Recadat in that basement she was in pieces—most fingers on one hand missing, one foot bludgeoned to gristle and pulp, one knee shattered completely. She’d gone in and out of consciousness.
The perpetrator had been pursued by public security for a year, and had meant to return her to us as a statement. Back then I did not take interest in the psyche of the perpetrator, why he did not just breach but entirely obliterate the social contract; why he abducted and dissected children, or why he tortured Recadat. I simply shot him in the head, and there was much paperwork to fill after the fact, though Internal Affairs eventually let me off the hook. That night I’d saved very little. I had carried Recadat out as hardly more than a bloodied human torso. Her therapy to get well again, in body and spirit, took close to two years. I visited her every day.
“Brief me on what you’ve got.” I finish my abalone and drain my chrysanthemum tea. “Just like old times.”
Recadat enters her suite to find it submerged in gloaming, close to pitch-black. She doesn’t bother trying to access the room’s controls, knowing she would be prevented in any case. The layout is familiar enough, by now, that she is in no danger. In the dark she takes off her jacket, folds it, hangs it on the back of a chair. For a time she sits and closes her eyes, counting her breaths. Any unpredictable event can be met as long as she knows the rhythms of her body; any setback or obstacle can be borne as long as she is anchored by her goals. She thinks of Ayothaya’s riverbanks, their endless flowing wealth. On her world rivers are goddesses and the soil itself deific. Every root and fruit and rice grain bears a fragment of the divine.
A hand alights on her jaw. “And how did it go with your mentor, my jewel?”
She tenses. Then relaxes. Her lover’s touch always has this effect, an electric current—a shock to the nerves before she remembers what else it entails, the rest of what it can bring. “As smoothly as can be expected. I didn’t think she would be here. They made the Court of Divide too attractive. Too much carrot, not enough stick.”
A susurrus like scales against velvet. Her lover is sheathed in serpentine accoutrements, in leather that bends as supple as though it is attached to a live animal. “How much did you tell her?”
“You know how much. And how much I didn’t tell.” The careful balance. Recadat did not tell a single lie, not exactly. Thannarat was once her world, more than Ayothaya itself, more than anyone or anything else. The intensity of passion she felt back then, the lingering regrets after her partner quit the force and disappeared into the fringes of law. Never quite criminal but on the switchblade’s edge, a margin so thin there was barely any difference.
“But you didn’t tell her about me.” Their voice is low and amused, not honey but something that moves slower, sweeter and more fatal. Sugar of lead. “Why not? Don’t you trust her?”
“Been ages since we worked together. She must’ve changed plenty.”
Her lover smiles. Their blunt fingernails, painted in jellyfish luminescence, graze along Recadat’s throat. They’re the only source of illumination in this room and their movement casts odd shadows across her face. They are an antumbral vision. “Yet you feel the same about her, don’t you?”
“No.” Recadat shivers as a thumb runs across her mouth. Lust lances through her, rousing her fast in the way of drugs. It makes her feel like a lab rat at the mercy of her lover, whose touch summons at will pain or pleasure or a concoction that mingles both. Now the searing lick of a firebrand, now the sudden strike of lightning. Her nipples have pebbled to little points, dark ink against the white of her shirt.
“Don’t lie to me, Recadat. I dislike that—your truth belongs to me, and she’s the only one from Ayothaya you ever deign to mention.” Their fingers circle her throat like a choker, a collar. “Detective Thannarat was your ideal, the plinth on which you rested your beating heart. You told me how masterful you found her, how handsome, how . . . exciting.”
“That was before.” But her voice is short. The count of her breaths has gone astray.
“Was it, my jewel?” The hand lets go. “Stand up.”
She does. Disobedience is not an option. In so short a time they’ve trained her well, and she both wants and fears what they have to give. Her lover steers her to a full-length mirror. One of the lights snaps to life, the fluorescent cut of it like a whip. She blinks rapidly, disoriented. Her lover has undone her belt, taking off her holster and her gun, knowing that the lack of sidearm makes her feel naked.
“Detective Thannarat,” they say against her earlobe. “Do you wish to have what she has, or do you wish to have her?”
“I wish for no such thing. And she was monogamously married when we worked together so there was never a possibility. We have—” Her breath stutters. “We’ve work to do. An occupying army to repel. Fights to win. She’ll cooperate, she has no reason not to.”
“Your innocence carries its own appeal, Recadat. What an unblemished gem that is.” Her trousers have been slid off. They stroke her inner thigh, hooking into the dip between that and her cunt. She watches their fingers: if she shuts her eyes, they’d make her open them. “You believe in such simple things, hold on to such noble goals. Why not fantasize? When you’ve got what you want and arrive home the hero of Ayothaya, what shall you ask for? Your world will owe you everything; you can demand it all.”
“I’m not demanding anything. The point is to have Ayothaya safe, that’s what I . . . ”
Their thumb rubs. Their fingers delve. She arches against them, nearly on tiptoes, helplessly watching her own reaction in the mirror: her flushed cheeks, her trembling thighs, her hands scrabbling for purchase. One on the glass, the other on her lover. They are steady the way marble columns are. She clenches her teeth as one finger disappears into her—the wet noise so loud and shameful—and a second follows.
“I like that you’re inexperienced.” They bite her earlobe, not gently. Pain sings through her like an aphrodisiac freshly imbibed. “You came to me nearly a virgin, and what a delight it has been to teach you about your own responses. All taut strings, all mine to pluck, the gorgeous instrument of you.”
Her toes curl. The muscles in her thighs tense. Her mind races ahead, to the point post-climax where she’s limp and can barely stay upright, convulsing and clenching down on her lover’s fingers. She’s not yet there. She soon will be. Her lover knows her nerves and weaknesses so deeply, has mastered every nuance. The exactness of a surgeon.
“With all the pleasure I’ve shown you, you’d still return to your world an ascetic. So tragic. Don’t you want to experiment with what life can truly offer?” A knee nudges her thighs open further. One hand has snaked into her shirt, taking hold of a nipple, twisting it. “Don’t you want to do something about Detective Thannarat? Settle your feelings once and for all. Be free.”
Free. She’s never been that. The map of her life is constrained by obligations, even the matter of Thannarat, the matter that she had to let go or risk her career. Recadat’s hands close into fists and finally she shuts her eyes as she imagines that instead of her lover it is Thannarat’s fingers in her, Thannarat’s voice at her ear. On and on, relentless, a tide that sweeps through and shatters her without end. She’ll be as glass, broken to fragments and the fragments broken once more until all that remains is scintillating dust in Thannarat’s hand.
The sky is lavender tinged in yellow, a peculiarity of the atmosphere, though the air is clean, more than breathable: nearly untouched by industry of any sort. Enormous ribcages loom, not far, just outside Libretto. No one has been able to find out whether Septet was once ruled by megafauna or whether the machines have terraformed an otherwise unremarkable, uninhabitable planet and filled it with a skeletal bestiary that never was. I’m predisposed to the latter thought. On Shenzhen Sphere, the seat of the Mandate, there are artificial ruins—places that are and have always been red rust and blackened bones, created because one AI or another enjoys desolation as an aesthetic. And nowhere else in the universe does that aesthetic hold truer than on Septet.
Libretto’s outskirts overlook an exhausted energy well, where the earth has been carved so deep that this part of the city is a cliff, stark and jagged and stained so many shades by the reinforcements and harvest operations that it is luminescent, falsely beautiful. A chasm of oil-slick radiance and murmuring engine wrecks.
My overlays report elevated radiation and toxin levels. Most people don’t live so near the border. Even on this planet, an artificial environment made to support the Mandate’s sport, inequality still exists. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising—Shenzhen is said to be a paradise from the outside, but from the inside it is rumored to be less than perfect.
The residential blocks here are ramshackle, tall narrow buildings bent by time and corrosive elements. Uneven layers of bitumen coat the roofs. Doors are latched shut by bolts or the rare biometric lock, but by and large anyone can pass through. I don’t call ahead: the person I want doesn’t have the implants necessary for overlays. Has had them excised long ago, unless something’s changed.
Stepping into this building exposes an unpleasant truth. The Vimana is lavish, contemporary and sanitized. The floor of this place has borne witness to accrued strata of filth, dried blood and effluvia from plumbing failures. Its walls are pockmarked by wear and tear, by sudden violence.
I knock on a door that is better reinforced than most. It opens just a fraction; I’m let in and the door shuts immediately, as though to prevent the conditioned air inside from escaping. The room’s sole resident double-locks the door, bolting then securing it with a matrix that looks several generations out of date.
“Detective.” He attempts a stiff smile. “It’s been a minute.”
“You look well,” I say, though he doesn’t.
He’s thinner than I remember, loose-skinned, a wattle trembling beneath his chin. Pale to the point of gray, cheeks receded to the outline of his skull. His nose juts oddly as though it belongs to a much more dignified, patrician face. Bulging eyes that always seem afflicted by fundamental tragedy, hair the color of acid-blanched bricks. When he seats himself he does so gingerly, as though he thinks any moment the furniture might turn against him and swallow him whole. His name is Ostrich, the English word for a type of flightless bird—I’ve looked it up; strange-looking creature. When I first heard it, I thought his name sounded vaguely Germanic. In truth he came from the Catania Protectorate, so the name his parents or government gave him was likelier to be Italian. Giovanni or Giovanna or such; I’m not familiar either way.
“I’ve been worse.” Ostrich crosses his legs, uncrosses them, rearranges them and settles with them akimbo. “Didn’t expect to see you here. Didn’t expect visitors. Septet—terrible place. How’s your wife?”
“We divorced.” I don’t add that Eurydice is dead. Has been for eight years.
“Oh.” He inclines his head awkwardly. “My condolences. Eurydice was a lovely lady.”
She was more than that; she was resplendent and she was the world. But I’m not here to wax nostalgic about my ex-wife with him when he barely knew her. I hold up a card I’ve loaded with a tidy sum. More than he earns here in a month, by my estimate. “Tell me everything you know about the Court of Divide.”
“You really don’t do pleasantries.”
“I do them perfectly well with attractive women.” I give him a half-shrug. “I can ask after your health, if you like.”
He eyes the card. Estimating and speculating how much is in there. The disadvantage of having no overlays. “You wouldn’t care anyway. Are you here for the—because of what happened to Ayothaya?”
“I have a feeling,” I say blandly, “that what happened will be the only thing people know about Ayothaya for several generations.”
Those first bombardments, that first monstrous contact when the Hellenic army fell down upon us like ravening beasts. The Javelin of Hellenes is a polity that fancies themselves a nation of warriors and has been known to strike almost randomly, without cause or warning. Still, they pretended at honor, at heeding humane rules of engagement: no targeting of civil centers, medical institutions, aid stations. Who can complain? Plenty of armies would have done much worse. We could have been sacked by the Armada of Amaryllis.
The entire event—I can think of it with distance, now.
I angle the card this way and that, watching it glint, watching it catch Ostrich’s eye. “The invasion is someone else’s business—I’m here for a different reason, and I’m a little offended you would assume. My interest in Septet could be academic. Just because I look like a brute doesn’t mean I cannot pursue intellectual passions.”
Ostrich knows better than to scoff. Instead he moves stiffly to a filing cabinet. Even before the invasion, he was an unusual man: partial to antique means of recording, pen and paper, ink and lamination; even a few nielloware plates that he etched himself. Despite the distance he’s put between his present and former lives, he keeps mementos of his heritage and faith. Crucifixes of various sizes stand in his room, some empty and others burdened by the bleeding messiah. Statuettes of the virgin mother (now possible with womb-tanks; likely impossible during the prehistory of his religious apocrypha) either carrying her dead son or draped in garlands.
I lean against the wall, steering clear of the delicate statuettes. Wherever I go, I intrude upon fragile things. Lovers have ever told me I’m a creature of rough edges, rough strength, like an avalanche.
He produces a folder—an actual folder, plastic and aluminum, holding within it a wealth of papers. “Here.”
Ostrich’s pastime is sociology, and when I learned where he disappeared to, I understood his reason immediately—not just that Septet is out of the way and digitally isolated, but because it is a unique world. Constructed entirely to host the Court of Divide, yet not to function as an integrated state like Shenzhen. Instead it is more of a colony, and not a favored one.
Many of his notes are on the sociopolitical impact on the population, on how even the most basic elements of the tournament affect everyday life, transforming Septet into an economy of savage needs and carnivorous prices. There is rarely a lull between rounds—as soon as a victor is declared and infrastructure has been repaired, the next one begins immediately. Human residents amount to less than ten million, which makes this world essentially deserted. Most were selected from migrants aspiring to enter Shenzhen; they have been promised life in the Dyson sphere once they’ve served their time here. Septet as a halfway house with every inmate held to strict demands of conduct: perform as props for the Court of Divide and eventually earn admission to utopia.
Out of this population, some have themselves entered the game; plenty have ignobly perished. It is an exploitative equation, not that the Mandate requires Septet residents to participate. But consent given in desperation—to be out of here and in Shenzhen Sphere—is hardly true agency.
All this I already know. What I’m after is his case notes. Fortunately I learned his handwriting while he was on Ayothaya; his scribbling is difficult enough that it comprises encryption all its own. I flip through and find records of precedents where regalia killed their own duelists or where duelists destroyed their own regalia. The kind of information off-world Divide aficionados could not have found out, since what transpires on the ground is so secretive.
I scan the pages, collating them and setting the file aside in my overlays, then hand the folder back to Ostrich. “You must make a decent living selling this to new duelists.”
“I get by.”
“Is Septet,” I go on, “truly the Mandate’s only territory outside Shenzhen?”
His head jerks as though he’s been stung or slapped. “I can’t answer that, Detective. I don’t even know. Do you think the AIs come over here and tell me all their political decisions? Give me a roadmap of where they’ll set up shop next?”
Fair enough. “Did you ever see any of these people?” I present to him the reconstructed images. “Plus a woman from One Thousand Erhus—aristocratic, likely, well-bred and used to comfort? And an enforcer from the Vatican?”
“I’ve met them.” He names all but one as well as their regalia. The entire time he eyes the crucifixes nervously as though he hopes they could fold into an armored fort around him, a Catholic protection from the capricious universe.
“One last question. I’m given to understand that a regalia is limited to a single proxy and once it’s destroyed, that’s that for the AI and they’re out of the game. Is this a hard-and-fast rule?”
Ostrich’s exhalation is ragged, adrenaline and remembered pain. I’m not the first to have asked him dangerous questions. “Not always,” he says at length. “There are game rules and then there are Mandate laws. One flexes, the other doesn’t. You better stay on your toes, Detective.”
Once, on a frigid morning, I found him outside the walls of the Catanian consulate, bloody and weeping. He’d slit his own wrist. It was an inefficient method and the location public; he’d meant to be found. I gave him first aid and accompanied him to a clinic. Later I dragged him to a nearby bar—the kind that opens round the clock—and bought him mocktails until he stopped crying. He never did tell me why he’d attempted suicide, and soon after he disappeared entirely. It took time to track him to Septet. A world for lost things.
“Always.” I hand him the card. “Thanks, Ostrich. I’ll come back if I need anything else.”