Elephant's Foot

Lovers, those evening pilgrims,  

walk from darkness into darkness  

to an empty bench  

and wake the birds. 

• Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) 

The doctor had sighed when he’d laid eyes on the first cobbled streets beyond Tiếnvan airport. 

“Ah, my love,” he’d said, dreamy as a lovelorn maiden. “So colourful.” 

Colourful, Marya ceded, was certainly a word for it. Somewhere in the back of her mind – beyond the fog of sensory overload – she could certainly find appreciation for the way the houses leaned against each other like brightly painted stone trees, reaching their peculiarly slanted roofs up towards the racing canopy of clouds, people milling like ants among their roots. 

Mostly, however, jostled and sweaty and irritable, she cursed the high heavens for not blessing her with the fair hair of her mother’s side. She could see, in the eye of her mind, the way it would blaze in the patches shifting down the streets like a river of light, on and off and on again. ‘I’m here – right here,’ it would say. ‘Don’t run into me!’ 

Privacy be damned, the alternative was being turned into a greasespot, pounded into the streets by hoverbikes and feet. She would take sticking out like a light-bug in dead winter over that any day, thank you. 

A river ran by her right and she could see, pressed up to the railing as she was, the six-legged starfish pressed up along the metal tube, fluorescent patches flickering in the water’s dusky depths. Did they ever, in brief flashes of sober sentience, considered the river they lived in to be strange? With its hands and little cleaning robots that sped by on scheduled days? No river spontaneously formed this high up in such an atmosphere. There were energy stations on the anchor’s either side, connected by another aqueduct higher up, that the water flowed in and out of – a closed circuit, minimally wasteful.  

Not real. 

She adjusted her cap, watched the water rush on, felt it calm her mind as it did, felt it widen the horizon of her perception as the sensitive eyes of her Argos’ necklace chanced a peek at the running waves.

The twin aqueduct ran right above her head, peaking through masses of cement and metal; the islands of the park district – patchy and fenced off, enjoying the best of what light the anchor got. It was a wonder, really, that enough rays fought through that the lower districts didn’t need constant street lighting. 

The pole on her left lit up bright blue. It painted dancing stripes on the water surface, turned the ant crowd into a ghostly procession. The world swam in liquid twilight.

She hadn’t noticed the light dim down. 

Golden spots flickered across the night sky. Fluorescent fungi mapped where years built upon the pressure of years, from the foot of walls to the edges of furrowed clouds. Her necklace blinked at the vibrating air as it filtered through mycelium pores.

Out of the crowd into the shine of the lamp stepped a man in his late twenties, grocery bag in his hand, sweat beading his forehead. 

“You’re here,” he said, as he tilted his head. 

“You’re late,” said she, checking the time. “Five minutes, Duy.” 

Phung An Duy (for that was his name) waved a hand in dismissal and leaned against the rail next to her. In a move that seemed to deflate his whole being, he sighed, stared into the water, closed his eyes. Once he’d had his moment’s rest, like a dramatic houseplant after being watered, he straightened once again. 

“Ready?” he asked, stepping tentatively away from the rail. 

Marya peered beyond him, where two women and a man had started yelling about the price of a misshapen radish.

She sighed, shook her head, and followed him.

Luckily for her nervous system, though nowhere near short enough for her Argos’ eyes to stay safely open, it wasn’t a long journey. They shared custody of the grocery bag to prevent losing each other, putting faith in its durability under duress of the mutual unspoken agreement that holding hands was out of question. 

It was Yura – her brother, his fiancée – who was touchy-feely, not either of them. 

As it turned out, Duy lived in the park district, and he gave her a stern look not to comment as they loaded into the elevator, shooting in an instant through the air, away from the sticky crowds and half-hearted attempts at river-recreation. Stomach dropping, she stood as still as possible as the invisible hand of some unseen mechanism lifted them high into the sky – high enough she was sure she would hurl from it all – watching the tops of people’s heads fade into specks of dust. 

Crowds turned into whisps of smoke, houses into uneven ceramic pathways. A family of blue grey birds swept past them on an upwards current and disappeared into the trees. 

…huh? Trees? 

Her heart stuttered in confusion, then skipped a beat when the world disappeared. 

“Don’t worry, just the entrance,” murmured Duy, low, close to her ear. 

Marya rubbed her temples, took a calming breath, “I know, I know. I forgot.”  

She touched her hair to ground herself and spent the rest of the journey with her eyes closed. 

><

“It’s a wonder you don’t need glasses,” said Duy later that evening, peering at her from where he was cutting vegetables. “Turn a lamp on, would you.” 

Turning a page – carefully, nonstick wax covering her greasy human skin – Marya obliged. “Suong’s asleep?” 

Duy shot her a weird look before huffing, “It’s seven pm. Suong’s eight. If she were here, she’d still be bouncing of the walls.” 

“Where is she?” asked Marya, shaking off that strange shock at being confronted with the inevitable flow of Time. Somewhere over her shoulder, the cutting resumed. 

“At a friend’s.” 

“On purpose?” The eye on the back of her neck opened, stared straight into his face. Catching its gaze for a fleeting second, she saw him flounder before shaking his head in resignation.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” 

“Are you gatekeeping my almost-niece?” 

“Mari, please –” 

“Yura’s getting really nervous, you know.” 

Something hit the cutting board a little harder than socially acceptable. Slowly, thinking the better of continuing her petty stare-down, Marya turned around to meet Duy’s frustrated face. She waited, and, when he didn’t say anything, filled the silence herself. “Do you think that now you’re engaged you can just ghost him until the wedding?” 

Duy slapped his hand to his face, “That’s what you’re being weird about?” 

“He is my brother, in case you’ve forgotten,” said Marya, dryly. 

“Shit. Doesn’t anyone in your huge family watch the news? The lines have been down.” He sighed at her raised eyebrows, turning back to the counter, “Look, try calling, if you don’t believe me.” 

A pause as she did. “It doesn’t work.” 

“I said.” 

“But it should. Nobody said anything.” 

He scoffed. “Bureaucracy.” 

Shaking her head, she rebutted, “News channels are working fine. And people –,” she gestured at him, “– have clearly noticed.” 

“Corruption, then,” he suggested with a shrug, offhanded. “Come on, put the thing down. Dinner’s done. Do you have anything against celery?” 

“Which type?” 

“What do you mean ‘which type’? It was grown in Undersea if that tells you anything.” 

She raised her hands in surrender as she sat down at the table, and peered into the pot, “My stomach has a vendetta against Kepler-69c celery is all. Undersea should be fine.” 

Pursing his lips, grabbing the ladle, Duy said, “I don’t see why they gave them all the same name.” 

“Naming conventions. Their proper names are different.” 

“Why make the common names the same, then?” 

“Saves time.” Marya shrugged, then added, “Not that a lot of it wasn’t spent on deciding which key to use. Then a guy made a look-alike naming algorithm, and it was so effective that everyone else had to shut up or get left behind.” 

He shook his head in bemusement, “Before you leave, I’m taking you to trivia night.” 

“Duy,” she met his eyes, “the nature of my profession would make that inherently unfair to the other contestants.” 

A moment passed. They snorted, turned their attention back to the food.

“When?” 

“Friday,” came the answer. “Next week.” 

Marya nodded. Everything should be over with by then. “Then sure.” 

><

Come next day’s morning, Marya stood among white, grey, black spots left behind by bird droppings that had at some point in the recent past rained down to kiss the vibrant tiles of the street.  

“I don’t get it,” she’d told Duy as they exited the hyper-tram. “Why don’t they make the tiles white?” 

Shrugging, Duy had answered. “Art.” 

Then he’d waved goodbye and walked off to catch the number pulling up to the stop behind them, leaving her to stare up at the spiral building, birds of all sizes and colours flitting in and out of its eaves like kids at a jungle gym. 

“Alright then,” she muttered to herself, ignoring the weird look thrown at her by a short-haired girl speeding by on a hoverbike. Teenagers. “Passport – here. Warrant, cause, work pass… yep, here, and… this is a coffee coupon.” 

Brain cycling through all the colourful words she knew, she threw her travel bag down to the ground – inwardly winced at the beige and grey stains the dirty street’s embrace would imprint onto it – and proceeded to unpack and repack right there.  

This did not help. The card was gone. 

The world blurred then, like a person’s reflection blurs in the bathroom mirror after a long, hot shower. That, perhaps, is why she first cycled through all five stages of card-loss related grief, made the decision to somehow find her way to and thwart the security of Duy’s apartment second, and only then – halfway off the ground, bag zipped up, repacked – noticed the large figure of Professor K. Chaplinski smiling at her from above, bemusement shining through the intelligence of his eyes. 

“It’s a wonder they brought those back, isn’t it,” he commented, head tilted, waiting for her to pull herself together. His face was wide, eyes small, narrow, mouth thin-lipped, stretching far enough to either side of his face that, give a couple more centimetres, it would have divided it into two distinct parts. Marya found she couldn’t look him directly in the eyes and settled for nodding at the space between his pale eyebrows. 

Someone visited the Man in the Moon and taught him how to feel, she thought, staring at the lapel hanging out of his shirt at the nape of his neck as he turned, hands in pockets. Pale. Round. Unsettlingly expressive. 

The doors creaked open, and her train of thought was cut off.  

“They’re too easy to misplace, is the thing!” the Moon complained with a chuckle. He ushered her up the stairs, “It was Felicia, wasn’t it? It’s always Felicia.” 

It was Felicia, but that was not the point. 

“The archive expanded last year. The virtual id sets got too easy to replicate,” she explained, following him through the foyer and up another, smaller, narrower staircase off the left side of the reception. 

“I know the archive expanded,” grumbled Chaplinski. Who knew a grumble could sound cheerful? “I had to make number of very stressful phone calls.” 

“Ah. Sorry.” 

“You’re an employee, don’t apologise,” he assured her, almost running into a bird speeding from wallhole to wallhole. “O bozhe. Watch it, Chaplin!” 

Taking this turn for the weird – expected, thanks to a few handy travel guides, but yet unexplained – as an excuse to stop and pant, Marya leaned her hands on her knees, tilting her head. “Why are the birds flying through your walls?” 

“Part of a wildlife conservation program Thu Haa Minh came up with. Just keep your ears open. Buggers screech a bunch – it’s their bike bell, if bike bells were bad for your ear cavities.” 

Marya nodded as if she understood. Then Chaplinski looked back and laughed, shaking his head before turning another corner; traces of bewildered apprehension must have shown somewhere on her face.  

Sighing, she pushed off her knees and followed, a renewed cautiousness in her gait where she stepped in the way of one of those gaping, glassless windows. Each of them seemed to hold an entire sky; the orangeblue of Skysea’s atmosphere spilled in and out of each other like two seas – an incomplete segregation of temperatures, pressures, concentrations.

Currents split and sculpted these skies in lifelines sketched in faint rows of scattered ash. Small, flickering in the light of day, birds danced against the brilliance like shadow puppets in some dragging, psychedelic Saturday show. Their voices rippled through the air, entered the tower (for that was where the stairwell had led Marya and the Moon), echoed around its walls until they exhausted themselves, and left through the many windows as friends estranged by wavelength.

Heat clung to her like a blanket, cold brushed by her with long, passing fingers. She was starting to find it incredibly hard to breathe. Chaplinski’s easy cheer drifted from above. 

“No matter with the cards, though… you’ve got me! Good old cronyism, eh? Ah, hold on a second, I have to get this code in,” she heard him saying. “Imagine if I forgot now, ha! Novotná? Oh, where are you? Did you fall? Hello?” A pause. "Novotná?” 

Marya breathed though her horrendous cardio, “I’m fine. Give me a minute.” 

Ducking around two bright-yellow eagle-looking things cocking their heads at her from where they’d swooped in to land in the holes to her left and right like a comedic double-act, she rounded the final corner. Chaplinski stood not three feet in front of her. Behind him loomed a royal blue double-door, a finely engraved bone-white wave of winged beasts spilling from its borders to its handles. 

Instant relief bursting through her body, she stumbled the final few steps, crossing into the room beyond just as Chaplinski hit the correct combination and the doors flung open. 

“Don’t really know why we have the handles there either,” he said, crossing to the semi-circle desk in the middle of the room and pouring some water into a kettle. The doors closed behind them with a click; Marya finally straightened, heart slowing to normal. He breathed a chuckle, “Emergencies, they say. Ha! Who’s gonna be climbing all the way up here to get to me in an emergency? Just as good to break a window… Tea?” 

She shook her head, “Thank you.” 

“Sure? I have honey.” 

She waved him off, and he shrugged, pulled out a mug. Cartoon characters danced along its edges. 

The office walls were made of glass – they reminded her of the elevator yesterday, except it had had a glass floor as well; she found herself grateful that whichever architect had been in charge of the tower had forgiven himself that particular design choice. 

“It’s like a lighthouse,” she said. 

“Hm, I never thought of it like that. Grow up near the sea?” 

“More or less.” 

A beep rang through the room as the kettle finished kettle-ing. Chaplinski poured the boiling water into his mug, squirted some honey in there along with it, and sat back, staring into its depths, a content smile on his face. Marya realised, rather bitterly, that any socially justifiable waiting period was over.  

Sighing internally, she shrugged off her travel bag, pulled the tablet case with all its files, documents and notes out of it, and set it against the legs of one of two chairs facing the desk where the professor sat, eyeing her with resigned curiosity. “I suppose you’ve read the report.” 

A bird screeched into the window and bounced off it like a ping-pong ball. 

“A week or so ago,” he nodded. “It was a bit confusing.” 

Probably because it was written by Halini Surinaya right after she’d gotten a call that two of her three children had almost gotten ejected into space while on holiday with their wayward father. 

“Ah, well, we apologise for the confusion, but regardless… I’m sure you noticed the discrepancies in the financials section?” 

“Discrepancies?” 

Marya did not buy his act of ignorance. “The financial information about subsidies offered for the hygienic upkeep of the anchor regions because of… the extremely fast and demanding digestive and metabolic systems of some of the bird species crucial to maintaining the chemical stasis of the local atmosphere.” 

Chaplinski laughed, “Yes, yes. The super-poopers.” 

“It exceeds the amount that should be given relative to the amount of individuals belonging to those bird species three times,” said Marya, hardly one to beat around the bush. She watched Chaplinski’s face fall with some satisfaction. “We’ve tried to contact you about this on several occasions.” 

“Ah, well… we did send a memo. Perhaps it got lost? The lines are down now, you know.” 

“I’ve heard. Luckily, virtual barriers don’t limit in-person interactions,” she smiled – PR had told her to do that more. “If you give me access to the archives here, I can verify the bird population and update the numbers.” 

Fiddling with the unhingeable part of the mug handle, Chaplinski looked uncomfortably up at her. “Is that really necessary? I can just give you the numbers we give the Control guys in the Core. Ah, not that you couldn’t, of course,” he added hurriedly, waving his hands at her, “but it’s a hassle getting into the archives. They’re led by the conservationists and, you know, important job and all – couldn’t do without them – but they don’t exactly meet you halfway. The numbers are all the same.” 

Some part of Marya felt bad for the professor. It was all too true that the bureaucratic challenges that came with the nuances of an interstellar society had created junctions and barriers between sectors that previously walked hand in hand. The decade-old war against corruption after the Michaels Scandal on the Kepler69 sphere took those restrictions and ramped them up by two hundred percent. 

Another part of her, the one that had had to deal with one too many corrupt business owners trying to make use of the confusion to get away with embezzling money, felt nothing but cold cynicism. 

Look, he’s sweating, it whispered, he’s lying to your face. I bet you five coffees the numbers are different. 

Why coffees? 

Inflation is the Odysseus to your Troy. Coffee is the horse. 

I see. 

“What do you see?” 

Shaking herself out of her head, Marya looked up to see Chaplinski bending over the table to peer confusedly at the spot in the floor where her eyes had been shooting a blank stare seconds ago. He tilted his face up to her, eyebrows furrowed questioningly. 

She smiled crookedly. “Sorry, I was thinking.” It was midday by now and the daylight operating system had ramped the sun up to its full season-acceptable force. Only a fraction of it entered the room, mostly it just made the shadows around the furniture deeper. “Unfortunately, no. We need the archive numbers – it’s protocol. Against corruption, you understand.”

She added politely, “Not that there’s any here. Just in case.” 

“Ah. Precaution.” 

“Exactly.” 

He sighed, rising from his chair as if it pained him. Any cheer from before had fallen away and taken a diving leap through the cracks between the window panes. Marya supressed the urge to look down onto the street to see what happiness-shaped grease spots looked like. 

“Well, then. I suppose you should follow me,” he smiled tiredly at her. “Who would we be to refuse a civil servant, eh?” 

><

Forty-five minutes later, Marya was bracing herself for the financial strain that buying five coffees in a single day would put on her bank account.  

For one thing, the archives were incredibly easy to get into. The attendee at the desk had breathed an audible sigh of relief when Marya showed her the warrant – not before glaring Chaplinski out of the door, though, which did nothing to assuage Marya’s suspicions. For another, when the attendee, who was actually a third-year intern (Erelah Behrmann, as she learned – her family had moved to the anchor city clockwise off Tiếnvan from New Toronto on Gliese 1002c a generation ago), insisted on walking her to the right aisle herself, they found no trace of the document and were left staring at the shelf like two idiots. 

Dust itching her nose, Marya peered at her, “You’re sure it’s not still in the virtual database?” 

Erelah Behrmann shook short brown hair out of her eyes, conveniently doubling as staunch refusal. “We transcribed, printed, and double-checked everything we could the second the lines started failing,” 

“But –” 

“…we checked every day,” 

“Okay –” 

“…twenty people were working on it,” she barrelled on regardless, frowning intensely at the empty space in the section aptly named Financials: Boring Math Stuff for Anh. “The money stuff was definitely there. See the date on the side? Five days ago. I don’t understand where it went.” 

Letting her fume for a while, Marya looked up and down the aisle, crouched down to peer under the shelves – pointless; as it turned out, the ornithology department didn’t believe in conserving the habitats of below-furniture dwelling critters and cryptids as much as they did about those of birds. Wonder. 

“What are you doing?” Erelah fixed her a judgemental look. “If it had been on the floor, we would have seen it.” 

“Do you ever notice how much this place looks like a cathedral?” asked Marya. 

It did; the ceiling was arched, aisles cramped like church benches. The study area was silent save for the slither of paper on paper, the scratch of pencils, and the occasional muffled cough. It wasn’t bright – sunlight was bent into preferred colours by stained windows and thrown away from the fragile paper documents by cleverly positioned mirrors so that it slithered across the ceiling in dulled beams of a thousand different shades. Every scholar was equipped with their own lamplight, and they only ever seemed to look away from the small print to write down a note or two in little grey notebooks. 

If Marya walked through here without Erelah, picked up a couple dozen sheets, and left, nobody was likely to so much as notice. 

Erelah raised an eyebrow at her. “I’ve never been in a cathedral.” She sniffed and shrugged, following Marya’s gaze to the stained windows, “But sure, I guess.” 

“Does this Anh person still work here?” 

“Not really. She swings by sometimes, but she took a better paying job at some law firm in Undersea ten years ago,” she said, nose scrunching up. Her face was turned to the label, as if talking to the name could equate to talking to the person.

“Everyone still associates her with this stuff, so no one bothered to change the label. It’s from the Michaels thing.” 

“Right.” 

“Thu Haa Minh took her job for a while before he switched to policies and projects and whatnot. After him it was some girl from Teegarden’s star b, and now its Maria. Third generation immigrant, but I think she worked at HQ at Proxima Centauri while she…” Her eyebrows furrowed – her eyes locked on Marya’s. “Hey, isn’t that where you’re from?” 

Marya could do nothing but nod mutely. What the heck do you think you’re doing, Chaplinski. 

Noticing that Erelah was still staring at her, Marya reluctantly opened her mouth, “She was there before me, and then a few years after I started. She worked with Chaplinski.” 

Erelah, who was going to have serious frown lines later in life, glared furiously at a further undefined point just above Marya’s shoulder, “Of course she did.” 

“You don’t like him.” 

“He’s too nosy,” said she, shrugging again. “And the sky’s been changing since he came. Not a good sign.”

Marya felt a sudden rush of dread. “Changing?” 

“Yep. Freaky, huh?” A quick look at the clock. “Okay, well. Break’s over. Maria’s office is on the third floor, good luck.” Waving as she left, she disappeared into the archive’s dismal corners.  

Still cramped between questionably stable fire-proof shelves, Marya gave up on the luxury of lunch and prayed to any and all gods that may or may not exist that Maria was in a good mood that day. Then – for good measure and old times’ sake – she privately cussed out whoever thought giving them similar names was a good idea. 

><

It was her lucky day – the third floor was in the throes of celebrating one of the secretary’s birthdays. The birthday boy was in the middle of blowing out his candles when she walked through the door (use of the elevator was restricted to senior citizens, pregnant people, and the disabled, because the Centre of Ornithological Sustainability had a fitness plan and also because the world hated her), and clearly, whoever the organiser was, they must have made all choices of equipment on hard painkillers.  

A column of fire billowed towards the door. Marya’s eyebrows were only saved because her shock made her dive face first to the ground. 

Someone screamed. “Oh fuck!” 

“Is she dead?”

“Who bought the dragon candles? Stanley?” 

“Well, none of you stopped me!” 

“Stop yelling!”

“Are you okay?” A man in a pink shirt and a party hat kneeled next to her, hands hovering over her shoulders as if he didn’t know exactly what to do with them. 

Picking herself off the ground, she waved him off, “Fine.” Then, feeling slightly antagonistic, “You’re lucky they put so much of your budget into fireproofing.” 

He smiled nervously. It was lopsided, with a little dimple to the side. The smoke had settled on his glasses in a dusty layer of ash. “Yeah. That’s why we thought it wouldn’t be a problem.” 

“Should have locked the door.” 

A grimace. “Probably.” 

“Definitely,” came a voice from behind them. Marya turned, and there she was. “I go to the bathroom, and you almost kill someone… Oh. You. Hello.” 

Maria Ferrez-Tran was, by all accounts, a well-groomed woman. She pinned her long hair back with fake pearl-studded pins and tied it at the nape of her neck where it flowed ridiculously smoothly down to her midback. Her week’s wardrobe alternated between clean-pressed button-ups, tastefully patterned blouses, and dresses. Since entering university and first dipping her toes into circles that she had hoped would help her rise as quickly as possible to her desired position, she had cultivated her image to perfection. 

It had been twenty years since then. Her job was a backwater one.

She smiled at Marya. The warmth of it barely curled her mouth. “Wedding already?” 

“I was in the archives. Some numbers were missing,” explained Marya, watching her face turn curiously stony. “They sent me to you.” 

A raised eyebrow. “Hm.” 

The man in the party hat looked uncomfortably between them, gestured vaguely towards where the rest of the staff were standing, said, “Yeah, erm, so if you’re fine… I’m just… Yep,” and left. 

Having cast a fleeting disappointed look at his hurriedly retreating back, Maria locked onto Marya’s eyes once more; they looked comical, probably, like a mouse glaring at a dragon, but Maria’s fixed irritation more than made up for her lacking height. Marya stood still as possible, waiting. 

“My office is there,” she said finally, pointing around Marya to a room at the far end of the general work area. “We can talk privately.” 

“Thank you.” 

Maria didn’t respond. Walking briskly past the curious eyes of her co-workers, she slipped into the office, told Marya to leave her bags outside in a basket, and, when the door frame started beeping around her, to remove all the electronic devices she didn’t necessarily have built into her body. 

“It’s like walking through a spaceport,” commented Marya, pulling off her rings and earrings. “Do you have the crown jewels in there? Would you like me to strip?” 

“Are you done?” 

“Does the office chair have a seatbelt?” 

Maria sighed. “Just get in. I have a lunch meeting to get to.” 

Regrettably, the office chair did not have a seatbelt. Instead of sitting, Maria stood to the side of the table, watching her take her seat in the rickety chair (made out of wood, miraculously). She stretched her legs as far out in front of her as professionally acceptable – they hurt from all the stair climbing. 

There was a long moment’s pause. Maria’s patience ran out. 

Gesturing at Marya slightly (her equivalent of dramatically throwing up her arms), she prompted, “Well? Go on.” 

“You’ve heard why I’m here?” Marya waited for her to nod. “I’d like to ask if you know anything about that.” 

“The archives are none of my business. Go to Behrmann.” 

“Behrmann said that if anyone had the missing document, it would be you.” Seeing the scepticism etched stubbornly into Maria’s face, she elaborated, “Apparently, you’re the one in charge of asking for and obtaining donations as per the biyearly census.” 

Sighing deeply, Maria sank into her chair, and locked eyes with her. Outside, the chatter of the birthday party quieted, though whether by cause of people leaving for lunch, returning to work, or partaking in collective eavesdropping was anyone’s guess. 

“I didn’t take them out personally. I’m pretty sure no one in the team did either,” Maria said, deflecting the implied accusation like the professional she was. “But I can check, okay? Launch an in-department investigation, double-check the records of what came in and what went out, all of that. And then I’ll tell you if your excursion was worth it.” 

“Aren’t there any people you could send me to, meanwhile? Who might know something more?” 

“I can’t promise anything else.” 

And that was the end of that. Marya stood. “When should I come back?” 

“When I call you.” 

“I can’t accept that.” 

Another long-suffering sigh. “Three days. Fine?” 

The room had no windows, was completely bare except for a few empty photo-frames. Marya felt spectacularly claustrophobic, and Maria looked like she was about to jump out of her skin. 

“Yes. That’s fine.” 

Left hand opening a silver case on the table, right hand waving her off, she murmured, “It’s a date. Now, please, get out of my office.” 

Gladly, Marya got. 

><

There was something about the act of waiting that repulsed Marya down to the very marrow of her bones. Made her frown involuntarily, screw up her eyebrows in frustration, twist a bottle cap between her fingers like a faulty robot. Her soon-to-be niece found it hilarious. 

“You look like that…,” she forced out between giggles as noodles slipped from her grasp and splashed back into her soup. She muttered something unintelligible and had another fit of muffled giggles.

“Hm… I’d say like Miss Wei's grumpy, fat tomcat.” Duy, who’d decided to be helpful that morning, offered, closing the bathroom door. Suong burst out laughing, hair darkening from regular ash to the darkest corner between a wardrobe and a floor. Soup sprayed across the table. 

“Thanks,” muttered Marya drily, not really offended but irritated enough to pretend to be. 

They laughed at her. Because they were dirty traitors. Still, the morning was, as per cups of liquid irritation coursing through Marya’s veins, not so bad. Suong’s eyes shown with excitement that only children and madmen managed to consistently hold within their bodies, Duy bobbed his hips to the music coming out of the radio – some jazzy piece from the late 70’s of the last century – and Marya buried her chin in her hand and listened to the babble of their conversation, nodding reverently when Suong explained, with as much seriousness as her little round face could muster, the importance of practice in the journey to becoming a guitar virtuoso. 

No matter how snugly the blanket of human connection settled against her anxiety, however, she was aware that the slam of the door was just as sure to blow it aside. Having clicked the door carefully closed behind Duy and his crazy child, she buried her head in newspaper clippings (Duy had told her, with only mild confusion, that they were in the drawer under the bookshelf) and in the dreaded trenches of online media. Though it had gotten faster and better in the centuries it had been around, the quality of person that interacted with it remained unchanged, so places like Ouram, Yolk, and Stellar had grown equally as toxic and terrifying as the 21^st century cradle apps of Twitter (X), YouTube, TikTok, or Tumblr. In fact, she felt a bit silly, studying each and every word as if it were the holy grail.  

She was an archivist, not an interstellar spy, damn it. 

Twenty minutes in, her voice murmured weakly into the tepid air in the living room, “No harm in cross-examination.” Cajoled in her delusions, she continued.

Still, her two human eyes studying one text and her ten golden eyes each studying another, quick fingers jotting down the basics while the extra circuit in her brain saved the rest, she wondered if a career in interstellar intelligence wasn’t entirely out of her reach, either.

By lunchtime, she had begun painting herself a rather depressing picture on the state of TOI’s online freedoms. While online media all more or less corresponded with what Chaplinski had told her the day before, the newspaper clippings decidedly didn’t. Either Duy had strange hobbies and sought out these clippings specifically, or this was a recurring theme. For Yuri’s sake, she hoped it was the latter. 

“pH levels are most definitely changing,” one said. “When this correspondent contacted the Director, he didn’t respond for three weeks. I finally received an automated message that redirected me to the Public Bureau of Information (PBI). This is a cause for concern because…” 

This one Marya pinned. 

“For reasons unknown but likely related to recent growth of the local economy, new spices are now available for import directly from Lantern,” read another. “Sources say that they will be charged at 75 percent the usual price.” 

Irrelevant. Discarded. 

“Greater discharge observed from the lover-level clouds, creating semi-permanent lightning banks in Undersea. Farmers are complaining…” 

Maybe. Stowed under a coffee mug.  

And so, it went on. Issues from the past year Duy had – possibly due to the escalating weirdness of general existence – kept in full. Hurray. Most illuminating was, predictably, the section on governing departments.  

See, after the Michaels scandal, the truly corrupt oligarchs of the galaxy developed new and improved ways of squeezing money out of people. But they were also forced, along with every governmental body excluding security, to make public every transaction of data, money, etc. to support transparency and lower the number of civil protests to locally manageable skirmishes as opposed to what looked to be a precursor to a galaxy-wide coup d’état. Bad for the oligarchs. Great for Marya. Specially since there had been no report of any transaction of any transaction of a physical copy of financial data from the department of Ornithological Sustainability in the past seven months.  

If in three days, therefore, Maria did not have the document, then she was either lying or someone had stolen it. Both of these options pointed to corruption – malpractice at the very least. Marya would finally have more than a few straws to grab. 

Newly invigorated, she dived into the science around Skysea’s atmospheric maintenance. 

The white of the morning had ripened to yellow, rotted to orange, and, as she made her second cup of coffee, sank into blue. By the time she lifted her head from her hasty mind-map making, she had passed by lunch and only just remembered dinner. Crossing the room to the counter to check, she saw two finished bowls in the sink, a third cooling on the kitchen table. Duy and Suong’s voices drifted through the crack of Suong’s bedroom door. 

Rubbing her eyes, slightly disoriented, Marya stared out the window at the dark of the park district, gilded purple silver by the nightlights hanging off the Lantern’s cave-speckled underside as it passed sleepily through the sky above. The belly of Tiếnvan glowed through the web of cracks between the islands, its river’s stripy serpentine back peeking through every now and again. She blinked. Blinked some more. Shook her head. Shifted her gaze to take a look at the polluted sky – watched it flicker with lightning and swim in muted pinks and golds which, as Oura user ill-pay-to-be-defenestrated888 put it, were “weird as balls, man”. 

A whine shocked her out of her brain-rot musings; Suong had started complaining about brushing her teeth. Muttering a quick prayer for Duy’s continued sanity, Marya turned and took her dinner. 

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The next few days she spent gathering evidence and recruiting small children to do her bidding. Said small children being Suong and her overenthusiastic band of friends. In some ways, they were better than a professional investigation team.

Because of the various unconventionalities of their environment, anchor children were prone to and by adults encouraged in attempting what appeared to Marya as insane athletic stunts reminiscent of spider monkeys. So, children often ended up in places they most certainly weren’t supposed to be in and had to be escorted out by whatever responsible adult found themselves at the scene. Marya simply took that energy and directed it somewhere. Really, she was doing society a favour – in more ways than one at that. 

All Duy had said when she’d asked him for parental permission was, “Yeah, sure. ‘s long as they don’t go to the shipping docks.” 

Which, well. Suong was smart. And if Marya stuck a tracker onto her socks every morning, that was for her to know.

By the hour her follow-up “talk” with Maria rolled around, she felt confident in her knowledge of situation. Specifically, that a.) there was one (as the plethora of photos her child army had taken had proven) and b.), she wasn’t being paranoid or delusional. Climbing up the stairs, smiling, admittedly a tad sadistically, to herself, she thought of Chaplinski. How friendly he’d been those days ago. How quickly his smile had fallen when she’d gotten down to business. 

Elevator music playing from hidden speakers – a cosmic joke – accompanied her fight against the endless flights, braincells still bopping to the beat as she crossed the office floor and knocked on Maria’s office door. She frowned when nobody answered and knocked again. Then again. 

“Looking for Maria?” asked a green-skinned woman sitting to her right, her desk pressed up to the window, a number of mirrors reflecting sunlight onto her face and arms. Her gaze turned sympathetic when Marya nodded. “She’s on holiday up on Lantern for two weeks. Sorry. You’ll have to come back then.” 

Marya didn’t comprehend. “What?” 

“Yeah, we have mandatory vacation weeks. She usually takes hers around this time. I’m really sorry you had to climb all the way up here for this. Can we help you with anything?” 

It took five seconds for Marya to make sense of what she was hearing, long enough for the woman’s concern to start morphing into suspicion.  

Pulled herself together, Marya stepped back towards the exit. “No, that’s okay. We had an interview scheduled. I’ll ask for it to be moved. Have a nice day.” 

Five minutes later, staring at the poop-speckled pavement, her oxygenated brain making the necessary connections between ‘she told me to come today’, ‘everything is wrong’, and ‘she’s on vacation’, two things she’d suspected since she’d first met with Chaplinski became a certainty: 

One: specially positioned people within the department were making detrimental changes to the ecosystem in order to benefit personally from funding, and 

Two: Erelah Behrmann was never getting that document back. 

Damn it. Sometimes being right is a bad thing, Marya. She felt her body lurch forward, heard someone bark at her to ‘PAY ATTENTION’. Lifting her head, she saw a red machine pull up to the station, the number four blinking a proud turquoise on its side. Taking a standing spot behind the driver’s cabin, she watched the city’s colours whiz by. There was a report waiting to be made by her now, one that would take at least a week to reach her bosses, another week to inform the Eye’s administrative officials, another two to be properly processed and investigated. 

Erelah was right, the Oura users were right, the newspapers were right. 

How much time was left for an unbalanced star?