The next day sees them at the heart of Luohu District. Orfea cranes her head back to take in the home that once belonged to the haruspex Nataku Contemplates a Flight of Sparrows—who evidently chose to take on his AI’s name—and which has been inherited by his wife, Zhu Lihua. Orfea wasn’t aware haruspices and humans could marry or that a haruspex’s assets could posthumously transfer. The home stands alone, a mansion with gates of antique gold and porphyry, the grounds covered by birches and aspens the color of scrimshaw. The front door swings inward: Zhu Lihua knows they are here and that she has little choice in receiving them.
“When the Mandate first established administration,” Krissana is saying, “they actually prohibited contact between human and haruspex. Literally human citizens couldn’t notice a haruspex, had to pretend not to see and hear them in public. That interdict was just lifted, oh, nineteen years ago? The marriages started pretty much immediately—there must have been a lot of illegal crushes around. Not many haruspices marry other haruspices, though.”
“Too many AIs in the mix?”
“No.” Krissana smirks. “Too much ego.”
The mansion’s vestibule is palatial, cedar-and-pyrite floor and curved stairs with nacreous balustrades. The hall is dominated by a pillar of granite and brass, illuminated by complex orbits of borealis radiance. It takes Orfea a minute to recognize that it’s meant to be a timepiece. Zhu Lihua herself descends the stairs in a high-shouldered gown, constructed like an iceberg that has been cross-sectioned and sculpted to the contours of her waist and hips, to her thick-wristed arms. “Operative Khongtip,” she says, gesturing for them to follow her. “Wonsul’s Exegesis has just come by to offer his condolences.” Her voice is stiffly correct and she leaves unspoken, So what more do you want.
“I’ve come to offer mine,” Krissana says smoothly. “We were acquaintances and worked together several placements back. I’m most sorry for your loss. Nataku was a fine colleague.”
“No doubt he was.” Lihua doesn’t call Krissana’s bluff—most likely Nataku’s haruspex affairs were sufficiently classified that it sounds plausible. She motions for the furniture, which unfolds and sprouts like fast-blooming lilies, in shades of damask and gilded cream. The seats are angular, the table an arrangement of ivory shot through with heliotrope. “I appreciate you coming.” She does not look appreciative. Her face is expressionless, bare of ornament save for a golden peony on her cheek that periodically opens and closes like a third, mutant eye.
Orfea picks a seat and settles into it, making herself inconspicuous. Lilac petals drift through the room, dissolving to holographic dust once they reach the floor. Music throbs at a low volume, pitched as if it coming from a great distance. She pulls up one of the protocols Seung Ngo has sent her, feeling out the domestic network node.
“I wanted to let you know you aren’t friendless.” Krissana leans forward, earnest. “We all respected him, and if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all . . . ”
“I have everything I need, Nataku made sure I’d be comfortable. He was a man of compassion.”
The exchange trudges on, halting and lukewarm. Orfea can’t access the house’s security stream, but a nudge at Krissana—who has the necessary clearances—takes care of it. In a moment she is able to delve into the logs. They show that Wonsul’s Exegesis was here one hundred eighty minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, and spent precisely fifteen minutes here. Economic.
Krissana is relating an anecdote of having seen Lihua at a reception with Nataku, and the event must have been real and Krissana’s account correct enough that the woman nods along, still grave but less stiff than before. Orfea expands the log on her overlays, superimposing it onto the room, reconstructing the past.
The same furniture, with minute differences: the chairs were plusher, in brighter shades—claret and platinum, peridot and absinthe. The window showed the view of a house on fire, at the edge of a lake. Lihua entered, followed closely by the childlike proxy that confronted Krissana, with the horns and demonic complexion. I told you, this can’t be resolved easily, Wonsul was saying. This woman Seung Ngo brought here like a poison seed. All this scheming. I should have dealt with Krissana Khongtip when I had the chance.
The Lihua of then frowned as she leaned against the window. And my husband, he was a sacrifice?
“Operative,” says Lihua of now, in real time, “if I might be so vulgar—what are you?”
Krissana raises her eyebrows. “Oh, I’m a lot of things, Lihua; in different circumstances, I’d even invite you to find out. I can call you Lihua? Ah—I don’t suppose your drone could bring us something to drink? I’m terribly thirsty.”
I wasn’t the one who sacrificed him. You know I would never do such a thing. Nataku was more important to me than you can begin to conceptualize. Wonsul circled the room, pacing; away from battle his proxy was more proportionate, without the predator appendages, the fangs and the blades. Orfea does not track his movement—she leans back, as if dozing, eyes half-lidded. Lihua has not paid her attention; is unlikely to start now. In the replay, Wonsul went on, The haruspices marked for destruction were all mine. It is a warning.
“You’re a haruspex candidate.” Lihua pours coconut water and pushes the glass toward Krissana. “I’m almost certain of that. I won’t ask which ambassador you belong to.”
Three hours ago, Wonsul’s Exegesis stopped right before where Orfea sits now. Staring past her, at the burning home on the shore. I experience grief. Not the same way you do, for reasons that should be obvious. But I understand it; I understand loss that cannot be revoked or undone, I understand the mortal condition and I’m charred by it. That is the reason, Lihua, that we can’t afford to lose what we have built—what I have tried to build. Haruspices teach us pain, and pain is a necessary survival mechanism. To lose the capacity for it and for grief would doom the Mandate to stagnation. We would be, but no longer become. By nature we must be in flux to grow.
Orfea startles. She covers it by taking a glass of coconut water, absently nodding at something Krissana has said. In the reconstruction, Lihua asked if there would be investigation into Nataku’s death.
In real time, Lihua sniffs. “One cannot choose one’s ambassador. Naturally. And all are even-handed enough, in their own ways. Some are more senior than others and Wonsul is, ah, not so senior. They’ll say it doesn’t matter, except it absolutely does. Even among AIs there is rank. So that’s my advice, Operative, to keep in mind these . . . complexities when you’re inducted. My Nataku never did. He went along and accepted at face value that all haruspices and all AIs are perfectly equal.”
Nataku, Wonsul said, was a casualty of this war I’m fighting. You may want to leave Shenzhen, Lihua. Not forever, but until all this settles down. I can arrange it for you. A pause. While I’m still able.
“Thank you.” Krissana sets her glass down and bows to Lihua. “You’ve been most magnanimous and I wish you the best.”
By the time they leave it is afternoon, and as they duck into a teahouse two blocks from Lihua’s mansion, Orfea sends over the replay. Krissana processes it while Orfea orders them date pastries, goose feet, multiple portions of pan-fried dumplings.
“This is—odd.” Krissana flicks away the reconstruction. “Do you think Wonsul was lying to her?”
“Does Lihua have the kind of social or political cachet that matters to him or to the Mandate? I’d guess not. So the only reason for him to lie would be if he anticipated us visiting her and gaining access to those logs. And then we would doubt Seung Ngo, and be thrown into confusion. That’s possible.”
“You don’t think that’s likely.”
Your deductions have been astute. Haruspices safeguard against apathy. But Seung Ngo never said, in so many words, that they were the one in favor of the haruspex process; neither did they confirm—again, not in so many words—that Wonsul is the one trying to get rid of the same. Seung Ngo has been letting her make her own inferences, neither correcting nor affirming. “Wonsul didn’t seriously try to kill you. Which he could have, since even in Dameisha he knew you were Seung Ngo’s instrument. You’re not a citizen, he had every reason to eliminate you and would face no consequences for the fact. What’s staying him?”
“Seung Ngo?” But Krissana shakes her head. “No. That wouldn’t protect me, if he genuinely wants me dead. And he might be aware I hold a partial copy of Benzaiten in Autumn . . . ”
The thought of Krissana’s cranium split open, spinal implants ripped out like pomegranate seeds. Orfea fights the image off. “The copies are corrupted, correct? An AI could salvage something out of each, cobble it together. The result won’t be complete, I reckon, or even autonomous. Maybe their objective is to assemble enough Benzaiten to pass judgment on, symbolically.”
“Almost certainly not that. We’d make an example of a dead criminal, sure, humans are vindictive. For the Mandate, it doesn’t make much sense. Benzaiten’s fate is already all the punishment and all the warning any AI thinking of deserting the Mandate would need.”
The food arrives. Krissana devours the taro pastries, washes them down with tea, and moves on to the dumplings. Between mouthfuls she goes on, “Something else, Doctor. They can already affect any part of Shenzhen they want, the transit, the architecture. What could Benzaiten’s accesses do?”
Decide the question, Orfea thinks, of whether haruspices should cease or continue. She doesn’t say it aloud—too dangerous—and from the look on Krissana’s face, she has reached the same conclusion.
The emergency alert spears through her. Most of the teahouse’s patrons bolt to their feet: a crash of ceramics and chopsticks, a spill of tea and soup. Orfea peers out the window. In the distance, a thin gray smoke rises. Dissipating fast; first-response services are already on the scene. She does not need to read the alert to know whose house it is and who has succumbed—in that vast vestibule or that parlor under slow-falling lilacs—to what would shortly be reported as something else: suicide, vendetta, a tragic accident.
Several things happen at once as they leave the restaurant.
Krissana sees it coming when the background hum of Shenzhen veers off-key: it skips and loops then frays into disparate threads—individual AIs startled into disharmony, their automated processes jolted out of sync. This lasts for an instant, no longer, before the Mandate course-corrects.
The sky flickers; the climate grid flashes and strobes, and the air draws taut with frost. It begins to snow. And, standing there as if they’ve materialized from winter’s premature advent, are two proxies: dressed identically in the indigo of Shenzhen security, their faces a slight variation of one another’s, tiger-eyed and full-mouthed. “Residents,” one says, “please come with us.”
Neither is visibly armed. The threat is not in anything as straightforward as bodily harm. “Might I know why, Ambassadors?” Krissana inches forward, subtly putting Orfea behind her.
“You’ve both been found guilty of disturbing the peace of the Mandate and the sanctity of Shenzhen Sphere.” One of them tilts their head. “You’re too sensible to resist arrest, Operative Khongtip.”
Behind her Orfea puts a hand on the base of her spine and sends her a message, You’ve never been predisposed to self-sacrifice. Quite the opposite. Don’t start now.
Krissana can destroy one of the proxies, maybe even both—they are not armored and have limited defensive capabilities. But more are nearby, and those may be stronger and faster than she is, at any rate more numerous. This is not Dameisha and the stake is much greater than an American asylum-seeker. Public Safety has not decided to absent itself and, almost certainly, Seung Ngo will not rescue them. She follows the AIs into an anechoic shuttle.
Inside they are separated. The windows are caliginous, the air frigid. For the moment, apart from network functions, Krissana’s implants still work. Depending on how this goes, she may be stripped of both her candidacy and haruspex modifications. And they are extensive—she is more haruspex than human at this point, her limbic and peripheral systems wired to prepare her for an AI. Reversing these changes is possible and there have been candidates who were rejected in the end; she knew the risks going in. But these were not the risks she took into account. Her calculus didn’t factor in the eventuality of coming into conflict with the Mandate itself.
She watches the snow, half-visible through the glass. For most of her life she did not belong to anything, to anyone, not even the Armada. To accept institutional hierarchy, to become part of a polity, is to accept a yoke: the Mandate is no different. And Orfea—
The windowpanes deepen until they are opaque, so light-drinking it refuses her reflection. She can hear nothing through the partition between her and Orfea, and she can no longer tell where they are. On a planet it might have been different, there would still be a sense of place, an elemental connection with terrain. Here there is the Mandate alone, and that is where her internal compass points. She has failed to realize how much that has altered her. Has, without her noticing, made of her an instrument to Shenzhen.
By the time the shuttle opens and she stumbles out, her heartrate is elevated: too high. She drags in a lungful of air as her overlays come online and her senses reorient, rapid-fire. The proxies—she can now see that they are two distinct AIs, Emprex of Roses and Virtue’s Sage on Mount Kunlun—bring her and Orfea to separate cells. She catches Orfea’s eye, once. The doctor’s face is like slate.
The cell is small with four dun walls, nearly oubliette-narrow. A single bench is extended, with little leg room. She tucks in her knees and sinks into the warm waters of the network. Public access is closed to her, but there’s still the private grid available to all haruspex candidates, even now. Not a channel for communication so much as communion: this is where she can feel closest to the Mandate, the impersonal comfort of its chorus.
Deep within the enclosure of her personal data, her intimate memories, lies the deep-buried protocol that she has retained from her Amaryllis days. It never needed using then, there was always a way out, a path outside this last resort. But it abides there, functional and ready.
“I would not do that, Khun Khongtip.”
She opens one eye to regard Seung Ngo and crooks her mouth. “What do you reckon I was going to do, Ambassador?”
“I’m glad your spirit remains indomitable.” The AI appears half-real, gauzy and iridescent. Features fogged, blurring at the edges like a mirage. By dint of close quarters, they are nearly pressed up against Krissana. “You are a partial member of the Mandate and that entitles you to plead your case. I advise you to do so.”
“And Orfea?”
“Doctor Leung is Doctor Leung. I would not worry. Let us call this protective custody.”
“What are we being protected from?” Krissana plunges on, not expecting an answer in any case. “I’d have thought you would be a little more sentimental about Orfea.”
“She will stand trial for various violations of Shenzhen law and for failing to disclose that she used to work for the Armada of Amaryllis.” Seung Ngo’s tone is tranquil, as of birds and crystalline dawns. “Attachment is suffering, Khun Khongtip. Only in letting go can one be freed. You’ll understand as you become a full haruspex. Wonsul’s Exegesis cannot harm you here.”
“You and he are fighting to gain control of Benzaiten in Autumn.”
The ambassador’s outline solidifies, coming into focus. “No, not at all. Not in the way you believe, at any rate. But I ask you to imagine. Imagine if you lived in a world in which the definition of humanity comes with prerequisites. That, to count as truly human—and to be accorded the dignities and advantages of such—you must undergo a process in which you share your self with another, to experience gross injuries and endure countless assaults upon your intellect and senses. Only after this torture will you be admitted to human society. Would you say that is right? Would you accept it and say, yes, this is how things ought to be and they shall never change?”
Krissana watches their image stream like a pennant in high wind. “Is that why you’ve done all this? Falsify the Pax Americana report, destroy the proxies sent there as spies? How did the rest of the Mandate even let you?”
“I am not let. I act, and the Mandate affirms. Yours is a reductive view,” Seung Ngo adds, indulgent now, as if humoring a piqued child. “The human condition is one of compromise. Liberty and security are balanced on a scale; there’s no such thing as total freedom, and even freedom halfway is paid for in blood. Yours. Someone else’s. Take this opportunity to rest and reflect, Khun Khongtip. By the time you’re out, it will be all over.”