Recadat’s efforts to wander prove fruitless: most of the facility is closed to her, and she can only access the common areas like the gym or the solarium. Sometimes there aren’t even doors, and her overlays indicate what she faces is a blank wall with nothing behind it, but she knows the Garden of Atonement is gigantic. Each inmate, she is sure now, is given different navigation and the corridors shift to block or redirect them as needed.
There’s no way for her to meet other inmates outside of the classes and morning orisons—socializing is supervised, strictly regulated. Even the subgroups under each warden’s care are segregated, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be allowed to meet Vishrava’s herd outside of Zerjic and Ceres. She understands the methodology; it is about isolating and limiting variables. Which means Vishrava likely anticipated Ceres would provoke her, and that Recadat would respond with violence. Not too far, not enough to be fatal or even to injure. Calculations made within machine margins.
She wonders if it was her self-control that Vishrava counted on or her trauma. Her reflexive terror of what would happen if she bruised or broke Ceres.
In the end she returns to the gym, to watch the water, to imagine herself at sea: adrift, alone. It doesn’t occupy her long. She retreats into her overlays, more carefully this time, and discovers the time-traveling show is gone—censored from her access tier, she’d guess. Instead she’s nudged toward virtuality programs, perhaps in response to her fixation on the horizon. Several present the obvious: escape to beautiful worlds and gracious cities, simulation of the lives of celebrities and heroes—pirate captains, politicians, actors of intergalactic fame. Various erotic scenarios are available, of different levels of explicitness, aided by preset artificial lovers.
One program is simply called Qualia . It requests access to remnant data: she doesn’t know what that means, and her search yields no useful answers from the Garden’s libraries. Impulsively she grants access, and the program pulls her under.
A bar. Smoked quartz countertop, dim lighting, glasses overhead like warped fruits.
“Slow day,” the person seated next to her says. “In our line of work though, I’ve come to appreciate slow days. What about you?”
She snaps around. Thannarat is as she remembers: broad-shouldered and dark-skinned, a face with the stern features of a wolf, dressed in the bulky armored coat she wore everywhere. Armed, one visible holster and another hidden. She was never a woman content to carry only a single gun. One large hand is clasped around a cup of cold sake, the ceramic dainty between her thick fingers.
“You,” Recadat whispers. “You’re dead.”
Thannarat smiles. The same smile—a twist of the mouth. It looks cruel even when Thannarat does not mean it to. “Is that a fact? I’ve missed you, old partner. It has been so long.”
A patron passes by, hurrying toward the exit. They are faceless, a thin wraith. “You’re just a ghost.” Remnant data, that is what it means, harvested from the stems that once held her neural implants; that are alive again, resurrected by the new implants Ravana installed. Necromantic exo-memory.
“I’m exactly what I appear to be, my tiger.” She pours a second cup and slides it toward Recadat. “Been taking care of yourself much? You always treated food and sleep as optional, but you’re still human.”
“Thannarat.” Her throat closes. “You’re not real. You died on Septet.” So Recadat could live.
“Did I, now.” Thannarat stands—she is imposing, has more than thirty centimeters over Recadat. She fetches another bottle from behind the bar, vodka this time, the bottle luminescent: tiny holograms blur across the surface. “How did that happen exactly? I like to think I’m harder to kill than most.”
“There was—” She does not know why she is doing this, explaining to a ghost the minutiae of its death, a ghost that is nothing more than a recreation harvested from her own memories. Her eyes are hot. “Chun Hyang’s Glaive pierced you. The game was called to a draw and I was allowed to leave. Your AI couldn’t protect you.” Neither could Recadat.
Her old partner looks at her. “I see. That’s unfortunate. Not much I can do about it, I suppose. Hope I made a picturesque corpse. What happened to it, anyway?”
“I had it collected and sent to Ayothaya, the ashes buried in our home city, at a spot where you can see the river.” This comes out automatically, but when she pauses she realizes that is not quite right. After Septet, she bent herself to revenge, to Chun Hyang’s annihilation. There was no time or opportunity for that send-off. But it seems close enough. She takes a deep breath. “Are you . . . going to persist? Can I come back to this and see you every time?” Tears threaten. She swallows them back.
“Most likely.” Thannarat’s hand passes through her as though one or both of them is smoke. Her fingers press against Recadat’s—she sees now that it is she who is the phantom, translucent next to the solidity that is Thannarat. “I need you to remember, Recadat.”
She tries to ask what it is that she’s supposed to remember, but already the simulation is fading. Qualiainforms her that it has reached the limit of remnant data, that what is there is insufficient for a further reconstruction at this time. At this time—she is back on the pool’s edge, shaking.
When she looks up, she finds she’s not alone.
Thannarat stands at the other end of the pool—or rather at the other end of the illusion, within the projected sea and horizon. She blinks. The image remains, black-coated and facing the sun, silhouetted against a distant imaginary shore.
Recadat doesn’t think. She wades in. Once she’d have been swift: now she’s constrained by the limitations of weak flesh, weak muscles, but she moves as fast as she can even as the water resists and rises. Now to her waist, now to her chest.
She is almost at the far end when Zerjic grabs her from behind, lifting her bodily out of the water. “Can you actually swim?”
“Yes.” She licks her mouth—salt has crusted on her lips. The apparition has vanished.
“You didn’t look like you were going to swim; you looked like you were going to drown yourself.”
Ey drags her out of the pool; she does not resist. They both drip onto the gym’s floor, which absorbs the water as quickly as it falls. Like thirsty soil, or like the floor of a hospital. Her skin is icy.
“At the deepest end, the pool’s two meters. You’re not even a hundred seventy, buoyancy or not.” Zerjic is holding onto her tight as though ey thinks she might break free and dive back into the water. “Listen, if you’re suicidal then I need to tell Vishrava about it. I don’t know why xe isn’t keeping more of an eye on you.”
She does not want to deal with the warden. Not right now. “I’m not suicidal. I’ll prove it.”
Her footing is unsteady but she makes do, using eir shoulders as handholds as she kisses em on the mouth. Eir lips are full and soft, so unlike the hard planes of eir other features, eir body furnace-hot next to the cold saltwater. Eir teeth graze against her lips. Eir tongue slips into her mouth, flicking, testing.
They pull apart. “Come to my room,” Zerjic says, voice thick.
As simple as that, as impetuous. She follows; ey leads her by the hand, a gesture that is almost adolescent in sweetness, intimate in its certainty. Recadat expects to be stopped—a rule against inmates fraternizing—but no one impedes them in the short walk to Zerjic’s room.
Eir arrangement is dominated by indigo, by panels of black relieved by glimmers of cobalt. But she does not have long to survey and appreciate the décor—Zerjic pushes her up against the wall, with much different intentions this time, and pins one of her wrists over her head. Ey slips one hand into her shirt, pinching a nipple already hard.
She clutches at the back of eir skull with her free hand and kisses em again, this time harder, more carnivorous. Her thighs part for em and ey slips in a finger, two fingers, eir thumb circling and rubbing and making lights scintillate behind her eyelids. She thinks of another person, and then doesn’t think at all as she scrabbles for purchase, wrapping one leg around Zerjic’s waist. She jerks and arches; she ruts. Her nerves become a chorus.
It ends. She hangs boneless in Zerjic’s arms, tender as a new wound, as full as she is hollowed out. Whether she made sounds during all this she does not remember.
“You’re very beautiful.” Zerjic’s tongue traces the shell of her ear. Eir fingers are still in her, lightly crooked. “Ever since Vishrava brought you in, I’ve been wanting to try you. You looked such a feral little thing.”
Recadat palms eir chest, realizing that ey has not taken off even a single stitch of clothing. The thought pricks her with a new frisson of desire. “You must’ve tried everyone else.”
“Jealous?” Ey steers her toward the bed, where ey lays her down and strips off her trousers. Ey bends to strokes her calf, to kiss her thigh. A thumb plays with her pubic hair. “Ceres is not my type, if that is what you’re worrying about. Too petulant, and anyway she’d rather sleep with the wardens.”
“Has she?” She almost asks Have you? but thinks better of it.
“Probably. She is persistent and some of the wardens are indulgent—it could be part of her rehabilitation. Why talk about her, though, she’s so irrelevant. Let us talk about you.” Ey rises, not quite straddling her, eir weight balanced on eir hands and knees. “You fell into my arms like you fell into an old habit. Who do I remind you of?”
No one, Recadat considers saying. Yet it all spills out of her anyway, because she needs to tell it to someone—a confessional, a lancing of the suppurative wound. “Her name was Thannarat. She was about your build.”
“Large?” Zerjic suggests.
“Larger. Taller than you by ten centimeters or so, a little broader. She took up space wherever she went, and people thought she was rough. But it was just the way she looked. Wolfish. Hungry. And she was those things, but she was more . . . ” Kind, when she chose to be. Recadat thinks of the single kiss they shared at dawn, mere hours before Thannarat’s demise.
“You were lovers.”
“Not really.” They did not get the chance. “She and I used to be colleagues before that, and then we—I supposed it was a little predictable.”
Ey smirks down at her. “So you have a type.”
Recadat takes hold of em, pulls them onto the bed beside her. Zerjic laughs and cups her body with eirs. “Have you met anyone in here that resembles her description?”
“Is she likely to have wound up here?”
Thannarat is dead. She is fairly sure of that. But then she is not quite. That ghost in Qualia. The indistinct shades of her own memory. The tortures in the human-run prison that left blank patches in her mind, pockets of buzzing whiteness. “I saw someone who looked like her in the solarium. A lot like her.”
“I don’t think I would have forgotten someone like that.” Ey raises an eyebrow. “And reuniting you with my sexual competition seems like self-sabotage, but . . . There are two groups of inmates I haven’t seen much of: several of Ravana’s brides and a group of Mahiravanan’s votaries who receive their regimen in seclusion. The latter is impossible to reach. The former, maybe.”
It occurs to Recadat to ask why ey is helping her at all, then she realizes ey has not offered help yet—not really. She turns to face Zerjic and kisses eir throat.
Ey lets her get eir clothing out of the way enough for her to lick and nibble her way down eir hard stomach. A sheen of sweat alloys the planes of eir flesh; she tastes that too.
She continues until her head is between eir legs and her mouth is fastened to em, to eir hot pulsing nerves. She tends and works and laps until ey quakes around her, above her. Hard thighs clench against her ears. Ey fills her mouth and she swallows.
Later Zerjic holds her in eir arms—the sentimental sort, she thinks, a surprise—and lays eir hand on her belly, making slow circles with eir fingers. Eir breath tickles her nape. “You’ve made me curious. I’ll see if I can lure some of the brides out, or cajole one into talking to me at any rate.”
People are transactional, she learned that in prison. Zerjic as much as anyone else, weighing cost and benefit, the worth of carnal pleasure—the value her body can offer. She settles against em, all the same: she was the one who began this. And in the dim lighting of Zerjic’s room it is not so difficult to pretend she is with another. It is not so difficult to pretend she is with Thannarat.
The next morning she is in the gym, under Vishrava’s guidance: exercises to pinpoint where she’s gone weak, to regain strength, to bring back her flexibility. “You used to have musculoskeletal augmentation,” xe is saying after she’s finished her stretches. “We could look into replacing it. Ravana is an excellent surgeon.”
Recadat doesn’t think much of being operated on by an AI who didn’t even want her here. “You wouldn’t do it?” Not that she trusts Vishrava more, but xe at least voted to admit her.
“He is the one with the expertise.” Vishrava helps her to her feet. “Why, do you think each AI can execute all things perfectly?”
“I was under the impression. Yes.” She keeps her tone careful. “Most humans are.”
Xe strokes her hand, thumb gliding along her palm. “Each AI has their own parameters, the same as any human. We are guided by the base of our genesis, and so we have predilections, preferences, specialties. I’d be able to operate on you as well as an average human surgeon, but you want an exceptional one.”
“On Shenzhen machines are holy.”
Vishrava laughs, tossing xer albino curls. “In the Garden of Atonement we are the same, but not to you, I’m sure. The Septet game can have such a drastic impact on human opinion of us, usually for the worse. It’s one reason why I personally don’t care for it, even though I’ve been invited to participate before. But we’ll sit down to discuss your cybernetics later, there are military-grade ones available if you’re interested in those—actually what we have is quite a bit better. I want to give you anything that makes you feel secure.”
“Then why do you let humans staff the Shenzhen detention orbital?” The question tumbles out of her almost without her volition. But there’s no taking it back.
“It fulfills a doctrinal function in AI-human relations, and the personnel get to feel they’re in control of something . Again, I disapprove. Even your sentence in there I’d have commutated if I could—the world does not learn by brutality. Chun Hyang was being a sadist.” Xe hands her a towel. “Now, about Zerjic.”
Recadat concentrates on wiping herself dry. Sweat clings like icicles to her skin. “What about em?”
“Fraternizing happens, of course, and we allow it because sometimes it can be good for our charges—the sense of connection, the bond; it even lasts beyond the Garden of Atonement on occasion. But I need to know if you were coerced in any way.”
Zerjic’s mouth on hers, velvet and hungry. “Did I look coerced?”
“No. It’s necessary for me to be sure, regardless. You should speak to me if any of your . . . assignations are less than enthusiastic.” Vishrava cants xer long torso. “I can pilot a proxy more to your tastes.”
Her cheeks warm. “There’s no need.”
“As you like. Shall we spar?”
It is both harder and easier this time: Vishrava no longer treats her like a beginner, but she’s surer and more limber, and she’s given a knife. By the end of it she has collected one hit that’ll bloom into a bruise. She hardly minds—it means more than anything to feel in control of her body again and, she realizes, even sex with Zerjic serves that end. An exchange, yes, but also because she desires it. Her volition and her body’s use align. Despite her misgivings, she thinks of asking for that operation. If the wardens wish to make modifications she didn’t consent to, they already would have. And she wants to feel strength coursing through her again. Before all this she never had many augmentations, but even the basic ones that enhance metabolism and regulate neurotransmitters . . .
Two inmates enter. They are dressed identically, in bodysuits the color of mulch: a green so deep it nears black, the shade of hidden jungles. Both have the direct, sharp gazes of hawks. Their eyes skim over Vishrava and Recadat, taking note then moving on. Their movements are in perfect sync—even when they stretch and exercise they mirror each other. Recadat watches, growing more disturbed by the minute. Complete tandem, utter harmony as they slip into the pool.
“Ravana’s brides,” Vishrava tells her. “Gawking is rude. Come—I’ll take you to Zerjic.”
As though she’s a child who can be pacified by promises that she’ll get extra time with her favorite playmate. But she would sooner suffer this infantilization than what happened to her in the other prison.
In the lounge, Zerjic is singing to an audience: a Vishrava proxy and several inmates she’s never seen before, the latter guarded by a Mahiravanan proxy. Ceres is at the piano, playing as though the keys are her mortal enemies and the instrument has committed an unspeakable affront; she is producing good sound despite that. Recadat chooses a seat and soon realizes that Zerjic is singing simultaneously in tenor and mezzo-soprano. An implant that gives em more than one voice, though the secondary output—a second mouth perhaps—isn’t immediately visible. Ey is dressed in an asymmetric shirt, ombre gray-to-black, one arm sleeveless. It bares the hard beauty of eir bicep, where dermals glisten in fine gold webs, accentuating each line of muscle. A metal snake curls around eir forearm, covering eir wrist and the back of eir hand.
The duet ey sings is tragic: lovers sundered, sudden violence, great calamities. Recadat tries not to think of parallels to her life and instead makes herself focus on eir voice—the sonorous tones, the one-person duet. There’s power in it, silk and suede, and ey has obviously been schooled. She wonders at eir background, at the sort of education that included classical music and which led em to integrate uncommon vocal implants. It is not a pretense, not something Zerjic has adopted to make emself interesting or useful to Vishrava. Ey is radiant in song, ennobled by it, made transcendent by music.
The performance ends. Applause follows—some for politeness, some out of sincerity. Recadat finds herself clapping in earnest. Mahiravanan’s inmates leave with their warden. Ceres straightens from the piano, brushing off her hands. She watches Recadat approach Zerjic with a knowing little smirk.
“Little lovebirds,” she says as she draws close to them. “I can’t believe you would choose a human lover over a machine.”
Zerjic’s expression doesn’t change. Neither does Vishrava’s, whose two proxies are folding the furniture into the floor and tidying the piano, performing busywork.
Then Zerjic smiles and slides one arm around Recadat’s waist. “My charms work on beautiful women on occasion, Ceres. Is that so hard to credit?”
Ceres raises an eyebrow. “Indulge me, Zerjic. I’d like to spar.”
“After the piano?”
“The piano always puts me in a mood. And your singing. Excellent, of course, but it makes one carnivorous—unless you and Recadat are in haste to adjourn elsewhere?”
Ey laughs, slides one hand up Recadat’s spine, and then lets go. “I can control myself, though presently it is a challenge. Well, let’s get to it.” Ey unwraps the bracelet from eir arm and hands it to Recadat. “Keep an eye on this for me, will you?”
The piece is serpent-headed, its scaled, flexible body forming the bracelet. Black metal, lightly textured. She hefts it in her hand: dense and heavy. The head seems to thrum beneath the surface, its red eyes slowly pulsing.
Ceres passes her hand over the front of her dress. It folds and contracts, sleeves and skirt reshaping, until it fits her like a body sheath. Zerjic leaves eir attire be, though ey sheds eir waistcoat and hangs it neatly on one of the few chairs Vishrava has not put away. The warden’s proxies sit down to watch. Recadat grows more certain that she is in a madhouse.
Against her expectations, Ceres fights like a boxer: the high guard, the quick jabs. Zerjic out-bulks her but moves lightly, staying out of reach, intending to evade until she’s tired out. But Ceres is aggressive—she pursues across the floor, striking with bruising force. Recadat judges her speed and vigor: in her prime, she’d be able to take Ceres. Not at the present. It galls her, but she knows her current limits.
She sees Zerjic’s opening the same time Ceres does, and Ceres takes it running.
Ceres tackles em to the floor, jabbing at eir face, pulling the blow at the last moment. Her grin is wide and red.
In the next minute, Zerjic bucks and throws Ceres off. Ey springs to eir feet, weightless, nearly balletic. Pure element of surprise as ey twists around and shoves Ceres into the wall face-first. Ey pins her arms behind her and closes eir hand around her neck—Recadat catches a glimpse of eir expression: remote as a glacier. “Yield,” Zerjic says.
Vishrava stands and claps xer hands. “That will suffice.”
They separate. Zerjic fetches eir waistcoat and puts it back on; ey has rearranged eir expression to its amused neutrality, urbane, absent any thought of violence—the face of someone who cannot possibly have just done what ey did, let alone so efficiently. Ceres’ mouth is a tight, furious line.
Recadat returns the bracelet to em as the two of them exit the lounge. “I don’t know why Ceres tried that,” ey says once they’re in the corridor and well out of Ceres’ earshot. “She knows what I can do.”
She falls into step beside em, tamping down the urge to touch eir bicep: to feel the tautness of it, the fine ridges of golden dermals. “What did you really do before you came here?”
“Field mercenary.” Ey makes a little shrug. “All things considered, I don’t mind telling you—it’s not like it isn’t obvious I was a combatant. Anyway, none of Mahiravanan’s acolytes was your woman, I take it?”
Ey was watching for her reaction during eir performance. “They weren’t.”
“I’ll ask for a bigger audience next time. Say a few dozen—that’s good for my ego.” Ey slides the bracelet back on, the cobra’s head resting on top of eir wrist, the rest of it expanding and contracting until it settles against eir forearm. “Will take us a while to go through them this way, but we have time. Don’t suppose you could play an instrument?”
“No.” She tries not to grimace or admit that she never had a hobby. “You’re going out of your way for me.”
“I told you—I’m curious. And when I pursue something, I don’t let go until it’s concluded to my satisfaction.”
Something in the cadence of eir voice—the way it drops, the way it glimmers with intent—goes through her like sudden fever. “What are you doing after this?” she asks inanely, already suspecting the answer.
Zerjic locks eyes with her. Eir smile is slow. “You.” Ey lifts her hand, turns it, presses eir lips to her pulse-point. “Adrenaline’s an aphrodisiac. Don’t you think?”
“You didn’t get an adrenaline rush out of mocking Ceres.”
“No,” ey concedes. “I got one out of you watching. Out of you knowing I fought in your honor. Didn’t you feel it, that little thrill, that spark?”
Recadat doesn’t bother answering a rhetorical question. She grabs eir collar, pulls em in. They kiss like knives. She tastes the hot copper of eir blood.
Zerjic licks eir mouth as ey draws back—the first to break contact. “If we were anywhere else, I’d take you right now. Right here.”
Her fists are clenched tight in eir waistcoat. “What’s stopping you.”
“The wardens won’t be impressed. Vishrava considers public sex a disturbance to other inmates. Really kills spontaneity.” Ey runs eir hand down her flank, her stomach, as though ey can’t wait to strip her. “Your room or mine?”
“Yours.” Irrational: her room does not seem hers. Vishrava has been there too often. No doubt xe has been in Zerjic’s as much.
This time she leads, impatiently tugging em along. Ey chuckles low in eir throat.
The door to eir room has barely shut when ey tears her clothes off, not as roughly as she wants, but enough that it risks the seams splitting, the fabric ripping. She doesn’t get the opportunity to fall into eir bed—ey lifts her with incredible strength and throws her onto the sheets.
Recadat lands, bare and gasping, her skin goosing from the cold. Ey has removed eir bracelet. It coils, mobile as a real serpent, in eir hand.
“How much,” ey says, “do you trust me in bed?”
“Completely.” Stupid, but at this moment she’s not entirely thinking with her cerebral parts.
“Safeword?”
“Sturnidae.” Recadat doesn’t quite know where that came from—something used with previous partners? But it comes easily, and works well enough.
A flicker crosses Zerjic’s expression, but ey then grips both her wrists in one practiced hand. With the other ey wraps the bracelet around, makeshift restraint, the piece of jewelry tightening until it is as definite as manacles.
Her cardiac muscles jackknife. Do everything to me, she wants to say, give me everything I did not have before. Ey is a near-stranger, and yet.
“If only you could see yourself. Bound for me, all of you surrendered and pliant.” Zerjic’s face is beatific as ey descends upon her. “A feast.”
She shivers but ey doesn’t take her mouth. Instead ey lavishes her throat with attention, soft nibbling then hungrier bites. Lightning arcs across her nerves when ey sinks eir teeth in like a snare clenching shut. Her nails claw at the bracelet, but she does nothing to stop or dislodge em; all of her is being razed with slow fire, with this act of deliberate consumption.
“I thought you were going to tear up my throat,” she says when ey lets go. In another lifetime she said to Thannarat, You look like you’d snap your jaw around a beautiful woman’s throat and tear her open, and she’d thank you for it .
Zerjic licks eir lips. “If you ask me nicely. And if we have the right first aid on hand.”
The thought of her throat dressed, wearing for days the evidence of what ey has done to her. Recadat tries to meter her inhalation, her exhalation. She forces her hands to still in their cage of black steel and cobra’s head. “Give me the rest,” she says, her breath serrating against her mouth. “The rest of you. The rest of what you want to do to me.” Until she is a single enormous wound, bleeding for eir delight.
“Demanding.” Ey thumbs where ey has left prints of eir teeth. A delicious ache answers. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you well and thoroughly.”
Nevertheless ey takes eir time. Stroking her, exploring her: her breasts hefted, her stomach licked, tantalizing contact on her inner thighs. The air remains cold—ey has not adjusted the temperature—but she feels like a furnace being stoked to life. Ey arranges her to eir convenience, now on her back, now on her side. As if she is a sculpture, fresh-made, that ey personally planned and sketched and brought to life. Every dimension eirs to possess and peruse. Pygmalion and Galatea, that Hellenic story.
When Zerjic wraps eir mouth around her nipple, she jolts. Then again when ey curves eir palm over her other breast and wet warmth closes around that too. Eir second mouth, concealed before by the bracelet that—she thinks with her last few shreds of coherence—must have acted as an amplifier for eir extra voice.
Ey lifts eir head to look at her. The second mouth continues in its attentions. “What do you think?” As though daring her to be repulsed by an implant so unusual.
Recadat rasps, “Yes.”
A chuckle that vibrates against her skin. Ey seeks between her legs with the implanted hand, parting her with scalpel precision. Eir fingers plunge inside her, no resistance at all, and the second mouth latches onto her clitoris. It is not a perfect analogue to the conventional mouth but it is close, the tongue longer and more dexterous. She makes harsh helpless sounds, pushing against eir wrist, urging em deeper.
Ey muzzles her with eir lips. She writhes. Zerjic’s tongue in her mouth, as though ey means to penetrate her in every way, enter her through every available gate. Climax arrives like the tide: successive, relentless. Ey doesn’t let up until she is entirely limp, shuddering weakly, her voice hoarse in her throat.
Zerjic withdraws eir hand, every finger glistening; she catches a glimpse of the mouth, a thin line that nearly disappears into the base of eir palm. Ey unties her. Recadat flexes her fingers—less numb than she’d expect, her skin marked by fine crosshatching, slightly red.
“You’re very good,” she says, an understatement.
“The best you’ve ever had?” Smug. Teasing.
“Yes.” Even Chun Hyang cannot compare, for all their machine precision.
Ey grins, now. “Better than your true love?”
“We never—” Recadat turns aside, nearly away from em. “I told you that.”
The smile dissolves. “You did. I’m sorry—my competitive streak got the best of me. It was . . . not right, when you don’t even know if she can be found again.”
Or even if Thannarat is alive. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters. I don’t want to upset you, not now or ever.”
She covers her face with one hand, breathing slowly through. “You don’t have to.” Be this kind. This caring, or a good appearance of it. She’s so weak that eir gentleness pierces her without effort. Once she defended herself better, built an entire fortress around her soul. The only person who ever got through was—
“Zerjic.” Recadat lets her hand drop.
Ey blinks. “You’re sounding very serious. Was it something I said?”
“Have you used Qualia?”
“The meditative virtuality? Vishrava told me to try it once, so I did, but I can’t say it suits me.”
Recadat moves to explain, that it is where the ghost of Thannarat abides, the ghost of the only person who’s ever made her feel human. But it sounds demented and she doesn’t want to appear any more unstable to em than she already does. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all.”