In the end Zerjic takes off most of eir clothes so ey can lie skin-to-skin with Recadat. Ey seldom does that with a new lover, but Recadat is special in more ways than one. When Zerjic presses eir bare chest to her back, the last tension in her body drains away and she settles against em, calming into deep sleep.
Ey’s always had a weakness for this, for watching a lover at rest. And she is beautiful in repose, the only time ey’s seen this woman so tranquil. What has been done to her ey has some idea of, and ey has not pressed for detail. Learn too much and sympathy will blunt em. Ey’s more invested than ey should be as it is.
When Recadat arrived, Zerjic already had a suspicion; the codeword Sturnidae confirms it—that this is the package ey’s been waiting for. Of necessity contained in a human body, there was nothing else that could have entered this place undetected. Now all ey has to do is keep her alive until she completes her work, and after that she will become the altar-sacrifice while Zerjic secures eir exit. Though by then, if all goes well, extraction will be as simple as walking out and slipping into a suitable ship.
Ey looks down at her. Grimaces. In retrospect ey should have asked the Ministry of Deficit Control to send a mule that wouldn’t be eir type—a man would have been easy to treat as the lamb on the chopping block. But then the ministry chief knows ey would have been less motivated to get close.
Zerjic lightly strokes Recadat’s stomach, feeling the sharpness of ribs there. Once there must have been more fat and much more muscle. Former police, and former participant in the Septet game. Brought low and shattered by the latter. Briefly ey speculates what this woman was like before all this happened to her; what she will be like if she is healed.
All that is foolish. Ey’s getting attached. What ey will need to do is to let her saturate the Garden of Atonement’s network with the isotoxal virus, then ey will activate what she has sown, and run. Home awaits, and more besides when ey returns in victory.
Recadat turns, wrapping one arm around em, muttering in her sleep. Ey doesn’t catch it—likely the name of her lost love, the syllables are about right. The wisps of her hair—some the bright green of starling pinions—stir under Zerjic’s breath. Ey does not consider emself soft or easily ensnared, let alone by a woman who would not give back the fullest of what ey has to offer. But ey knows eir vices. A certain fragility; the brittleness that wars with ferocity. Ey wonders what she’d look like in real combat.
A notification. Ey disentangles from Recadat, carefully so as not to wake her, and throws on eir clothes.
Vishrava is waiting for her in the corridor, in a proxy more adorned than usual. Jeweled cheekbones, mermaid scales on xer throat and breasts, a temptation brought up from the deep. “Zerjic,” xe says. “I trust the two of you have had a mutually restorative time.”
Ey smiles. Controlling eir expression has always come easily to em, even if the warden’s phrasing turns eir stomach. “Did you need me for anything?”
The AI nods, pleased the way xe would be with an obedient pet, a tame child. “In point of fact, yes. I’m due to receive an honored guest. She has particular tastes, and I’d like you to distract her so that she doesn’t splash around too much damage.”
An odd order. “How much distraction?”
“I don’t anticipate she will stay long. It shouldn’t be onerous—she is considered a beauty—and of course I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to. No need to tidy yourself,” xe adds. “She will enjoy the disheveled look.”
Odder still. Ey assumes the visitor can only be another machine, but Vishrava speaks of her like she’s a human—which seems impossible, unless it’s a new intake. But xe would not bring an inmate to meet one of those.
Vishrava leads the way to the solarium. It is empty—xe must have ordered other inmates out.
The guest who walks through the door is not a new intake; she moves too easily, too proudly. Not an AI’s proxy, Zerjic judges, based on how she carries herself. Something in her bearing speaks of habit and history, which machines don’t evince in their physical presentations. Middling height, shorter than Zerjic, clad in a dress whose upper half armors her in tessellated chitin. The lower half falls straight and heavy in a skirt of daggers, in amber and seared red.
“I was told to come see one of the wardens here,” says the guest. “You’d be the Wisdom of Vishrava?”
“Yes.” Vishrava gestures toward one of the ground-level enclosures. “Welcome to the Garden of Atonement.”
“I’m Krissana Khongtip, the human half of this haruspex.” The woman holds up her arm: her dress ripples and flows, hardening into a gauntlet tipped in talons. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to introduce myself like that, it sounds so . . . official. It makes me feel so respectable and potent, like declaring your military rank. I’m sorry to turn up on such short notice. My AI half is Benzaiten in Autumn and xe loves xer little pranks. Not to worry though, you’ll be talking to me and I am very serious, not given to mischief at all.”
“It’s the highest pleasure to receive Benzaiten.” Vishrava motions and the floor produces a set of furniture: three tall seats, a low crescent-shaped table. “I’d have thought xe would discuss what xe requires of me xerself.”
“Maybe xe wants a change of pace or maybe xe’s busy with something else.” Krissana lowers her hand: the gauntlet recedes, returns to being the sleeve of an haute couture dress. “You’re not in trouble. Xe is just curious, academically. So am I, I’d never heard of the Garden of Atonement until last week or so. Do you mind if I look around?”
“Certainly not, honored haruspex. In fact I’m providing you with a guide.” Vishrava nods at Zerjic. “Ey will show you our facilities and answer any questions you may have.”
“So kind,” Krissana murmurs. “Is ey dangerous?”
“Only if you want me to be,” Zerjic says lightly.
Krissana laughs, the sound high and sparkling. Her range lilts toward mezzo-soprano. “Then I must take you up on it. By the way, Vishrava, you don’t have pre-haruspices here, do you?”
“Naturally not. That is reserved for Shenzhen alone.” The warden bows with an archaic flourish. “Please, enjoy yourself.”
In the warden’s absence, Krissana appraises Zerjic with naked curiosity. She looks over the state of eir dress, traces the planes of eir features, surveying all of em as though ey is a map to a country she means to dismantle and conquer. “I’m about to be very frank,” she says. “I can’t help noticing that you look and smell like you’ve just had sex.”
Ey gives her a smile designed for a woman like this: slow, a challenge. The way one dangles a prime cut before a hungry lynx. “Yes. Vishrava dragged me out of bed. I usually dress a lot neater.”
Krissana’s eyes widen as she follows Zerjic toward one of the recreational halls. “So sorry that I interrupted.”
Zerjic thinks of Recadat in bed, the tender portrait of her. Ey hopes she is asleep still, at complete peace, and that ey’ll be back before she wakes up. Abruptly ey does not want her to be alone. “It’s nothing. And Vishrava’s assigned me a perfectly lovely task.”
“Xe must know my tastes.” The haruspex smirks. “It wouldn’t have worked on Benzaiten, so Vishrava anticipated I’d be doing the talking and not my AI half. Do you know what a haruspex is?”
“I have some idea. I should like to hear it from you—I can’t say I’ve ever met one.”
“A haruspex, like me, is a human whose body has been altered and prepared to host an AI. Two souls, one body, insofar as you count an AI as a soul. It can be a convenient arrangement. You can ask Vishrava about it, though of course there should be no haruspices here.” Krissana leans toward em. “You’re one of the Garden of Atonement’s . . . clients, aren’t you? How are you liking the place?”
They have stopped before a gate leading to one of Mahiravanan’s shrines. “The food’s fantastic—we do need to cook sometimes but I hardly mind—and the accommodation is gracious. It’s a little like a holiday. What’s there to complain about?”
Krissana’s mouth pulls into a sickle grin. “A perfectly proper answer. This project’s been going on for, let’s see, five years, ten months, and twenty-seven days. It’s an interesting concept, though I can’t say I agree with the methods. Redemption has to come from within, hasn’t it.”
Ey holds the door open for her. “That’s a little too philosophical for me.”
The shrine holds a Mahiravanan proxy that assumes the pose of the reclining Buddha. Its eyes follow Krissana and Zerjic, but it neither moves nor speaks. Within the golden folds of its robes, inmates curl up, fetal, or sprawl naked while whispering mantras into the fabric. A couple meditate, bleeding from lacerations across their arms and faces and backs. Zerjic scans the faces, though ey knows Recadat’s lover would not be among them anyway—has never been in the Garden of Atonement, whatever else Recadat may have seen. A consequence of the conditioning and rearranged neural stacks.
Krissana pinches her mouth. “This is all . . . very. Tell me, Khun Zerjic, do you find all this helpful and rehabilitative? Or do you find it a little sick?”
Mahiravanan offers no counter. Vishrava is not sending Zerjic any script on how to respond to Krissana. “I’m not one of Mahiravanan’s, so I wouldn’t know.” Ey shrugs, as though the sight before both of them is perfectly normal. “Vishrava’s program is different.”
“I could ask for you, inform Vishrava you struck my fancy so much I’d like to take you with me as my plaything. Being one with Benzaiten affords me a lot of perks.”
“Under normal circumstances, I’d never turn down a proposal from a woman as gorgeous as you. But for reasons of personal ethics, I’d like to complete my terms here.” To finish eir mission.
Krissana gives her a quick, wry look. “The woman you just left in bed, is she very beautiful?”
“All my lovers,” ey says solemnly, “are beautiful to me.”
“Silver-tongued. It really is a shame you won’t leave with me. Go on, what else does Vishrava want me to see?”
Their next stop, per Vishrava’s steering of Zerjic’s navigation, is one of the seclusion chambers for Ravana’s brides. Ey wonders if this is intended as an answer to Recadat’s search—Vishrava surveils xer inmates’ every move and would have listened in on eir pillow talk with Recadat—and this is the first time ey’s gotten so close to Ravana’s inner cloister.
The hall is low-lit, the ceiling draped in projected clouds. Late dusk, teetering on the edge of true night. Muted music and birdcalls. The brides lie entwined, asleep or mid-coitus; several are having or being had by Ravana proxies. Some are loud. Others make nearly no sound. None of them pause at the sight of visitors.
Exiting, Krissana remarks merely, “Well, I suppose that is more therapeutic. In sheer quantity, that’s the most . . . interspecies sex I’ve ever seen in one place. Do you participate?”
“I prefer to be more private. And I don’t favor machines.”
“Not one for orgies, then.” The haruspex fingers the pendant at her throat, a rose-gold cylinder embedded with auroral diamonds. “Then again neither am I, it’s too logistically involved. Three partners, at most. My wife, myself, someone honey-mouthed and handsome we ensnared as a gift to one another . . . ”
Zerjic checks their last destination. “You don’t have much inhibition, do you?”
“None,” Krissana says cheerfully. “Within about five minutes of meeting someone, I know whether I want them in bed and if I do, I strive my level best to get them there. I’m an honest woman. Embarrassment is a waste of everyone’s time.”
Amusement tugs at eir mouth. “I can respect that.”
Last they turn to a wide hall that ey knows well: far above are viewports from which spectators may observe, though everyone in the garden must watch the feed in any case when there’s anything going on here. For the moment it looks unremarkable, the ground flat and the ceiling unadorned, a few columns here and there bearing projected bas-reliefs of running animals. Clean, unstained by gore. When Krissana asks, Zerjic says only, “This is the ground for evening prayers.”
As though that explains everything or as though she knows precisely what it means, she responds with a thoughtful nod. “Well, I’ve seen enough. I will take my leave shortly, after chatting with the wardens a little more. Thanks for the tour, Khun Zerjic. I hope you remain in excellent health.”
Recadat is half-aware when a connection triggers and Qualia seeps into her overlays like ink in water. She does not stop it, for all that she knows it should not be doing this, should not be able to infiltrate her brain without her volunteering access.
But it is like being drawn into a dream she has been chasing. A perfect dream of a perfect day.
An orchard, this time. The noon pours down, liquid, and the shimmering grass is so soft that it undulates with electrum light as she passes through. The day warms the back of her neck and ears, and her limbs feel strong, full of grace. Years younger, transported to the time before her attempt on Chun Hyang and her prison sentence.
Someone waits for her beneath a tree of green-and-brass leaves and boughs heavy with rose apples. Some are natural peridot and ruby, others are more peculiar cultivars: shades of seafoam and bruise. Thannarat is holding several in her hands, eating them slowly. Glimpses of her teeth, white and sharp, raking through fruit. Self-consciously Recadat reaches to touch her throat, where Zerjic’s teeth marks would be, but they haven’t carried over into virtuality. Here she is a clean slate.
“I don’t actually like rose apples,” Thannarat is saying as she draws near. “I like things with more taste. Sweeter, tarter. These don’t even have the courtesy of being flavored hybrids. What have you been up to, Recadat?”
There is, Recadat realizes, a softness to the ghost that the living woman never had, diffuse next to the solidity of the real thing. “Not much. I’m in a sort of prison. Corrective facility.”
A low chuckle, rumbling in the back of Thannarat’s throat. “Whatever could you have done? You’re so law-abiding. Perfect moral compass, untarnished by the universe’s ills.”
“I tried to avenge you.”
Thannarat’s expression changes. “Why?”
At this she’s at a loss. “I loved you.” The ghost must remember that; it can’t possibly forget what Recadat knows—she’s already accepted that this is a fantasy cobbled together by records in her overlays and her fantasies. “And you . . . ”
“Yes?”
“Didn’t you love me?” An echo of a different conversation, herself saying things she can only half-remember. Thannarat, I’ve always . . . I never wanted anyone else. You were my war god. It comes back to her piecemeal. Something about it does not align but she can’t place what, or why.
Recadat, please. A gunshot.
The ghost simply smiles. “Of course I do. Not in the past tense, either. I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes. Anything.” The bite of desperation in her own voice. But she’s stopped caring about her own dignity.
“Come back here.” Thannarat takes her hand, blunt fingers stroking her palm, climbing up her wrist. “Every chance you get. Don’t resist when I come to you. It’s an imperfect vehicle but we have to make do. And don’t tell anyone about me—no one at all—not even someone you think you can trust with your soul.”
“I won’t.” She reaches out for the ghost, even as she knows this is a mirage spun from her fondness and longing. “I miss you. I miss you so much. I want to walk down riverbanks with you, have lunch with you—I wish we were together again.” Two halves of a whole, she thought, that would never be parted. Complementary hunters. Her the tiger and Thannarat the wolf. Before them anything could be run down and felled.
“Who knows? That might be possible. I’m not just your memory, Recadat, I’m a lot more. But these fruits, they’re so insipid, aren’t they? This one, though . . . ” Thannarat plucks from overhead—far out of Recadat’s reach—a rose apple whose skin is the shades of a peacock’s eye, vibrant emerald, brilliant sapphire. “This one is succulent. It should burst in your mouth like a supernova. Why don’t you try it?”
Recadat takes the fruit. It is frigid in her hand, despite the warm day. Dream logic. Putting it against her lips is like licking a slice of glacier, and when she bites into it, sweetness pours out: mango and jackfruit, a tint of bluebellvine. The juices run down her chin, flowing like a river undammed.
When she looks up, Thannarat’s ghost has been replaced. Zerjic stands smiling at her, holding another rose apple in eir hands, this one as black as the gaps between stars. The fruit grows and grows, eating through the radiance and substance of Zerjic, devouring until it blots out the orchard.
The connection snaps. She’s back in bed. Alone, in the dark. The sheets are warm; her skin is ice.
A second later she realizes someone else is in here with her. Not because they’ve made any sound. The sense of it is impossible to miss, a subtle shift, a certainty that she’s no longer on her own. She reaches for her sidearm and quickly remembers she no longer has any.
“Recadat.” The voice is familiar the way a scar is familiar. “It’s me.”
All of her draws spring-tight. Foolishly she turns the light on, the harsh gold of it briefly blinding her. When she blinks, Thannarat is there. Dressed not in the bulky coat and armor she prefers, but in a sherwani of green-black, patterned in gold serpents at collar and cuffs. It is perfectly tailored, cut to emphasize the breadth of Thannarat’s shoulders, the coiled might of her muscles. Cream trousers. The kind of thing a warden might give her to wear rather than attire of her own selection. In the most absurdist way this is what convinces; this is what lets Recadat know this is a solid person—a real body—and not her frenzied hallucination.
Her mouth is a desert. Thannarat sits—the bed sags under her mass, heavier than either Recadat’s or Zerjic’s. Her hair is gathered at her nape, held by a clip shaped like an adder.
For a solid minute Recadat does nothing at all, locked inside her own skin, breath shuttered inside her throat while her heart hammers.
“Aren’t you going to greet me?” Thannarat’s voice is soft. “Or ask questions?”
She licks her lips. Are you even real, you can’t possibly be . “Why are you here?”
“Why is anyone? I pursued certain courses of action after Septet. The Mandate decided this was the best place to stash me. Not so much for rehabilitation—” A sardonic lift of the mouth. “More for containment. My sentence here will last a decade more. As it turns out, offending them in a serious way proves quite unwise.”
A thousand sentences race through Recadat’s head. She wants to say everything; she wants to say nothing. Come with me. Let’s escape together. Let’s go back to how we were. This is the real thing, far realer than the frayed phantom in Qualia. Almost she brings that up but she squashes the thought—how embarrassing it would be to admit to the actual person that Recadat’s been chasing her wraith inside a virtuality. The fruits, the orchard, those motifs of longing are absurd now. “Where are you being kept? By which warden?” Whichever it is has allowed Thannarat to come here, to see her.
“All of them and none in particular. I’m kept in . . . a place far from your quarters. But it has been decided,” Thannarat adds dryly, “that my presence will be of help to you.”
Did Thannarat always speak like this, with this mild irony thrumming in the timbre of her voice; is her voice the same as Recadat remembers. Yes, surely the answers must be yes, Thannarat is tattooed onto her isocortex indelibly. In the prison she guarded this the most, her memory of Thannarat, defending it against oblivion and corrosive brutalization. A single seed of light. Recadat clenches her fingers around the sheets. “Stay with me.”
“It would appear you’ve found comfort elsewhere.” This is said gently. Nevertheless there is a hint of hurt.
“That’s because—ey . . . ”
“Was there, and I wasn’t.” A hand cups her face, the thumb slightly rough. Thannarat kisses her, slow, but with such force of intention that she is branded deep, hot iron into her gut.
She’s panting, eyes wide and mouth open, when Thannarat releases her. She reaches out, but Thannarat catches her hand and stills her.
“I can’t stay with you yet.” Thannarat strokes Recadat’s clavicle, her fingertips as searing as a vow. “And perhaps you shouldn’t tell your lover about me. No point creating unnecessary friction.”
Almost she says, I would discard Zerjic for you . The words thicken and dry up in her mouth. “Explain yourself to me. Tell me why you didn’t find me before and why you can’t stay.”
Thannarat stands. Putting distance between them, physical and otherwise. Her expression has smoothed over. “Not yet. I’m not free to do as I please. This is as loose as my leash will go. I’ll come to you again.” In a few quick strides she’s reached the door, and in one more she is gone.
The habit of inertia—sheer terror has reduced her to that—keeps her in bed a few seconds more. Then she kicks the sheets off and leaps to her feet, bolting for the door. Outside, the hallway is empty. She picks a direction and pursues. Her bare feet slap on the smooth hard floor, and she’s certain she is heading the right way; that she can hear Thannarat’s voice.
She nearly barrels into Zerjic.
Both of them pull up short, avoiding collision by a hairsbreadth. Zerjic’s eyes take her in before ey holds up eir hands, saying, “I’m not complaining about encountering you naked in the corridors, but . . . ”
She’s silent, scrambling for explanations. Settles on, “I’d be insulted if you did.”
Ey lets out a short, surprised chuckle as ey takes off eir jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. “The wardens are prudes, they’re not going to like exposure in public areas. Let’s go back to bed. It’s warmer too.”
Zerjic puts eir arm around her, eir fingers on her bare hip. By now she should be used to it, but it electrifies her all the same. For years she’s known what it is like to be driven to the brink of physical destruction; she’s known harshness, inhuman savagery. And now to be touched so lightly, so gently, as though she is a thing which deserves to be cherished: as though she is a person. The reason she could not outright tell Thannarat she’d give up Zerjic. She wants this, she wants more, she wants both until she’s sated.
“Where were you?” she asks, more sharply than she intends, once they’ve returned to eir room.
“Vishrava fetched me for an errand. I wouldn’t have left you alone otherwise.” Zerjic pulls her into eir lap, cradling her against em. “What really happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“I remember when you were wading into that pool. You had the exact same look.”
Recklessness like fire, and she the kindling. She wants to be held; she wants to be hurt. “Do you care so much because we’ve had sex?”
Ey stiffens. “I dragged you out of the water before we’d slept together. If all I wanted was carnal gratification, Vishrava would have obliged.”
“But xe would have power over you. You can’t subjugate and dismantle a machine.” Irrational things to say. She can’t stop herself.
“Recadat,” Zerjic says, “is that what you believe? That I get off on thinking you’re less than I am? That I wanted to take advantage because you were about to fall apart?”
“You must think I’m completely fragile.”
“No. But you must not think much of me.” Ey pushes her off, gentle but firm, and starts gathering up her clothes. “It’s best that you return to your own quarters.”
Recadat thinks to apologize, to ask for clemency: I didn’t mean it. I just wanted . . . Except it doesn’t matter what she wants. She puts on her clothes as quickly as she can, and goes.