Elephant's Foot

I awake light-hearted to this morning of spring,

Everywhere around me the singing of birds,

But now I remember the night, the storm,

And I wonder how many blossoms were broken.

• Meng Haoran (Tang dynasty)

The cup of tea had been cooling from the early morning. It sat on the wooden table, its smoke long whisked out through the open window by the midday breeze. That smoke – the very same that had tickled her nose as the sun’s first rays broke through the earth – curled among the clouds, playing just as nicely with vagabond lake water as with the purified sewage of the anchor islands and the Lantern.

Lot of good that would do her. Feeling cold ceramic under her fingers, Han Suyin swore she almost let out a tear.

She felt completely and utterly useless. They – their team, those who were drafted – had arrived in Aleva and Lablun and Hranow to help the locals fix whatever had gone wrong with the environment and revive their weakened fields. Instead, they became helpless spectators to the proceedings of a common tragedy.

Lightning flashed outside, accompanied by a belated rumble. She watched the brightness fade back out of the room, stared at the shelves as they rattled.

“Nice weather we’re having,” quipped a familiar rueful voice, and Han Suyin’s head whipped towards the stairs.

The Head of House of one of the largest TOI potato farms in Lablun ambled out from above, creaking her way down step by step.

Olga Krasova (for that was she) sniffed at Han Suyin’s frigid tea, “I was about to steep a cup. Should I make two?”

“Please,” Han Suyin nodded gratefully.

She pulled the teabag out of her mug by the string and handed it over to the fingers of Olga’s outstretched hand. The Head of House transferred it to another mug – a cheerful one with flowers and birds curling around the sides, a little clay Eye sparrow on the handle – with a plop. The other she fished from a blue tray with PLEASE RE-USE! written on it in bold black, throwing it into something that could pass for a small porcelain pot, a haloed saint in bright blue, orange, and gold smiling at them from its front and back.

Soon, the familiar hiss and hum of the kettle filled the room, bringing with it a welcome sense of banality. Heaving a sigh of relief, Olga sank into the chair across from her.

For a wonderful moment, Han Suyin forgot what a little prat the world was. Happy to remind her, the overflowing clouds and the deadened soil united for the second time in as many minutes. The room gave way to a wave of white. When that retreated, she saw her apprehension mirrored on Olga’s troubled face.

She tapped her chin, glanced at the kettle as it trembled, then met Han Suyin’s wary eyes.

“No good. This is no good. More frequent, isn’t it?”

A pang of guilt shot through her, “We’re trying to find out what’s causing it but –”

Olga waved her off, “Ah, I know. You have it hard. At least we know roughly where it’ll strike next now. If you can’t figure it out, it’s not for lack of trying. You don’t have eyes in the sky.”

Han Suyin pursed her lips. They could have had, but when Owen Wilkins had asked for the General Operations Pass (GOP) that they needed for operations that close to the next level’s economic zone, the anchor islands had refused him. Then Tara Jenkins had asked, and Penelope Silva too, and Muhammed Abdelnour, and Elmo Saar, and Szendreyné Tót Timea. By the time Han Suyin had gotten around to asking, the anchor islands’ embassy had curated an automated response, informing her that ‘her request was inappropriate and could she please, please just drop it and hurry off home’.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” pointed Han Suyin at the smiling saint.

Shrugging, Olga gave the mug a half-hearted appraisal. “Haven’t a clue. My cousin brought it back from her honeymoon two decades ago.”

“Where was she?”

“Proxima Centauri, I think. I forget, nowadays.”

It was easy to wave off the details with a famine looming at their backs. Han Suyin herself had, shamefully, almost forgotten to send her son’s fourth birthday present on time. It was bad enough that she would be so far for it.

“What’s got you so depressed?”

“What? Oh. Nothing, nothing, don’t worry,” she waved her off. Olga’s lips thinned, unimpressed.

The kettle started twitching, and her gaze followed Olga around the kitchen as she got up to hastily turn it off (it had caught fire, once, apparently), filled the cups with boiling water, returned to the table, and set one down in front of her. Resting her hands against it, Han Suyin felt her muscles melt into relaxation.

“Thank you,” she said, extending – for good measure – a second thanks to whoever first came up with the idea of throwing herb leaves into boiling water.

They sat, warming their hands, testing the surface, blowing and carefully sipping from the top. Olga had a chip in her front tooth from the branch that had hit her in the face last week. Her breath whistled against it.

The silence stretched, and, though it was comfortable, it felt expectant.

“It’s cold here,” Han Suyin said, finally. “I can’t ever really seem to relax.”

Olga nodded, humming. “It used to be warmer. We’re closer to the core, you know, so theoretically… that is, one would think…”

“Five years ago, right?”

“Five, four, six. Who knows. It’s not important. It is how it is.”

Han Suyin hummed, closed her eyes. “Do you know why?”

Olga spooned root syrup into her tea. “Not a bit. Josef – you know him, my son, the tall one, hangs around the bees? – tried to go figure it out. Drove all the way down to the city centre. They made him wait for three hours and told him it was budget cuts. That’s just code for ‘go away’.”

“Is there a pharaline from somewhere around here to the centre?”

“You want to go ask them.” It was a statement, not a question. She sounded almost disappointed, as if Han Suyin hadn’t understood what she had wanted her to hear.

“I think it might be important. I know we’re all trying, but we aren’t getting anywhere.” Lightning flashed again, something outside caught fire, they saw a farmhand run past the window, yelling for a hose. She looked at Olga pointedly.

Olga looked away, pursing her lips. There was a moment where she seemed to freeze.

Then, “Josef will take you in the morning. If you want.”

“I would.”

Nodding, she stood, “I need to go find where we threw the first aid kit. Throw a cloth over the mug? If I have to drink cold tea tonight my dreams will be full of ocean water.”

Not waiting for Han Suyin to acquiesce, she almost bolted from the room. The door creaked on its hinges behind her.

Sighing, Han Suyin stared at the wall of the darkened kitchen, and burned her tongue on her tea.

><

Riding with Josef was a pleasant affair. He liked bees, Han Suyin liked bees, and bees were interesting creatures that could feed a discussion for at least twice as long as it took to drive to Lablun.

Unfortunately, bees were underrated, and she was a meteorologist. This was possibly the first time she had heard Josef speak sentences longer than two words, and the first time she had bothered to listen for longer than ten seconds.

The sun basked the seas of burnt grass in molten gold beyond the windows of the craft. She watched its rays pierce higher and higher into the canopies of the few lucky living trees as they zoomed towards high rises reaching out from the horizon like giant fingers. Sometimes, when Josef got excited and lifted his hands of the wheel for a split second, they dipped low enough for the grass stalks to brush against their sturdy belly and clank against the metal knobs.

“It won’t get scratched?” Han Suyin had asked in between one tirade about dance signalling and another about horizontal and vertical hive evolution. Back home, they had The Anthill, the great tube highway system that spanned the earth, seas, and sky. Individual, rogue machinery of Josef’s craft’s calibre had long been banned.

He’d shrugged, blew some floppy hair out of his eyes. “I use a sort of fatty wax that solidifies and protects it. It should be fine. Besides,” he’d grinned, “everything’s scratched around here. What isn’t, isn’t being properly used.”

They’d blinked as an insect bounced off the glass, and back to bees the conversation had turned.

When they got to the centre, it was well past eleven in the morning.

Most folks were at work, the wide main streets were emptier than they should have been, populated mostly by the elderly and youth slacking off school. Lone middle-aged women bustled from business to business, balancing groceries, work calls, and small children in their arms or on aerial platforms bobbing after them on patterned leashes and secured to belts and back-harnesses.

They’d parked before the cathedral sitting tall and dark on the main square like a particularly majestic mountain troll. The three saints guarding the decorated double doors at the front stared blankly at them as they stumbled their way off the craft. That is, Han Suyin stumbled. She was too preoccupied with keeping her balance to care what Josef was doing.

As she dusted herself off, he patted her on the shoulder and pointed at a yellow building opposite the saints, squatting inconspicuously across the green-cobbled road between two brown buildings like a rectangular sun.

“That’s the Municipal Hall. And over there,” – long body curving like a stalk in the wind, he pointed around the cathedral, “– is the Lantern embassy. It’s blue and white. Can’t miss it. The Anchor Islands have theirs three blocks behind it, so third street to the left if you continue down the right side of the square. The Core embassy is next to the parliament… you just walk back here and head the other direction to the park. It’s across from the fountain with the octopus.”

She nodded, mentally jotting this down. In the middle of her process, he shoved a flier in her face and her visual sinuses were assaulted with an incredibly zoomed in picture of a conventionally attractive curly-haired man.

“Heavens above,” she exclaimed, swiping at the flier until he retracted it. “What the hell is that and why did you interrupt the process with it?”

“You could just jot all this down mentally.”

“I require validation of cognitive competence to live in peace.”

He looked mildly amused, “Really?”

She scoffed, “Is that bad?”

“Hey, no judgment here,” he shrugged. “I’m just surprised. It’s usually the people that don’t have the overlay that get petty about it.”

“I live to subvert.”

Raising an eyebrow, a corner of Josef's mouth twitched like it couldn’t decide what to do with itself, and he pressed the flier into her hand. “It’s for a barber’s shop. I’ll be there if you need me.”

She looked it over critically. The address was printed in tiny letters on the last page. What business still used fliers?

Looking up, she said, “The barber’s shop?”

Pointing at himself, Josef shook his head in demonstration. His eyes disappeared behind a curtain of hair. Huffing a laugh, Han Suyin lifted her hands in surrender.

“Besides, they’re a double business,” he added, brushing his fringe back, gaze following a TOI pigeon as it almost lost its balance landing on the top of one of the lower spires, “there’s a café in the garden.”

Humming in concession, she tapped the flier and said, “Here in time for lunch, then?”

A quizzical look, “Lunch is in an hour. Lunch-dinner, maybe.”

Internally, Han Suyin rolled her eyes. “It’s strange you still do the 12-6 thing.”

“Do I comment on your aversion to knocking?”

“That was the first day!”

“You’ve barged in on me five times.”

“Oh shoo,” she waved him off, turning to go.

Playfully saluting her, Josef turned to the street, looked left, right, left again, then stepped out and blurred with the steady midday traffic. In his absence, the air she breathed turned so tense and empty that she blinked in shock.

Unfamiliar machine, unfamiliar land, her hindbrain screamed, unfamiliar people.

Shaking herself, Han Suyin steeled her nerves and headed down the right side of the square.

She walked the streets with her eyes fixed straight before her, ignored for the most part as she passed by the old and young and busy, counting the streets and avenues branching left. (One, two, the third still far before her.) Still, she felt eyes on the back of her head. Whether it was by regular habit of observation, simple curiosity, or something more, she couldn’t hope to tell. It was uncomfortable, in any case, and she was relieved when she saw the Anchor Islands flag poking out from the window of a stout, salmon coloured building.

The golden bird soared on a bright red background, its wings trailing twenty white stars behind it like a wedding train. It shifted in and out of proportion. The breeze slipped between the folds of the fabric, blew them apart until they lapped as waves did, and Han Suyin, procrastinating on pressing the doorbell, watched it dance.

Following complications with the Eye’s virtual lines, many things had had to be transcribed into their physical forms, informative meetings included. It slowed things down, yes, but though the landlines worked they were unreliable in their age; most people opted against them unless it was strictly necessary. Han Suyin knew how faulty they could be from personal experience – her home was far from its Dyson Sphere (aptly called The Spiral for its unique structure) and was surrounded by three mining and excavation sights.

Just because nobody talked about it didn’t mean everyone wasn’t perfectly aware where leadership’s priorities lay.

The air stilled, the flag flopped. Fresh out of excuses, she took a breath and rang the doorbell.

Thirty seconds later, the door showed off its oiled hinges by swinging smoothly open. In its frame stood a man in what could be his late fifties or early sixties, stubble on his chin, a glass of water in his hand, glasses hanging off the pocket of his bathrobe.

He looked her up and down, rubbed his right temple, and said, just left of irritable, “Office hours start at eleven.”

She blinked at him, checked the time. “It’s eleven twenty.”

“Heavens, really?” He stared wide-eyed into space for a second, then deflated, sighed, and stepped back. “Come on in, then. There’s coffee in the foyer. Be so kind, give me a few minutes.”

Pointing her to an elegant, flower-patterned armchair, he disappeared into a side-room, bathrobe flapping after him. Han Suyin, still taken aback by the frivolity of being greeted by a host that was barely awake (and in a bathrobe), spotted boxes of luggage sitting by the stairs.

She scanned the walls. Neglecting the required political fluff, they were bare. There was a note on the coffee table with instructions on how to turn on the shower.

Perhaps, just maybe, the informality had a very human explanation.

Something beeped behind her, and she jumped out of her socks. Whirling around, she came nose to nose with a synthetic crystal koi fish, its scales shimmering in what daylight slipped through the cracks in the long-heavy curtains reaching from ceiling to floor like velvet pillars. It swam through the air around her, nosing at her a couple of times before setting down in the middle of the table.

Han Suyin settled down in the armchair and waited for it to do its business. When it rose again, leaving a steaming cup of coffee and a fun-sized jug of milk, she offered it her hand for it to press its pointy face against. It wriggled its tail happily, nudging at her like a touch-starved kitten.

A door slammed. The fish short-circuited, looked around confusedly, then zoomed out – presumably the way it came from.

The ambassador walked back into the foyer, the bathrobe traded for a suit and formal overshirt, titanium spectacles perched high on his nose-bridge, greying hair brushed away from his face.

He sat on the chair opposite her, setting a work bag next to him. He accepted a cup of tea from a purple-tinged crystal stingray, then turned to her, politely awkward smile on his face.

“Many apologies for that,” he started. “It’s the jetlag. Messes with the clock.” He indicated his chest with his forefinger. “It’s Belonoc today, Belonoc. Nobody runs around ringing up embassies during Belonoc. It’s why I came last night. Recuperation and all. I hope you don’t hold it against me, Miss...”

“Han.”

A nod. “Miss Han. What did you come to see me for?”

“I’m from the Recuperation Program for local agriculture. I wanted to ask why the Anchor Islands weren’t letting us do screenings of storm clouds.” A pause. The ambassador looked mildly confused. Han Suyin died a little inside, “You were briefed on the situation?”

The ambassador lifted a hand in a placating gesture. “Yes, yes, of course. It’s just that I can’t answer questions like that. For that you have to go to the Department of Meteorological Matters, or to the security men. The ornithologists, possibly.”

“I did,” she said quickly, adding, “Not just me. Several of us asked.”

“And what did they tell you?”

Han Suyin frowned. “That the refusal is a matter of level atmospheric security, but –”

“Well, then it’s settled.” Eyes darting to the open doorway on his right, he took a sip of his tea. Something akin to annoyance had begun tensing his jaw, flooding the space between his dark eyebrows. His pale green gaze zeroed back in on her. “I admit I don’t see why you’ve come here to ask this.”

“There is nowhere else I can go. They refuse to speak to me. I hoped that as a bridge between Undersea and the Anchors you would be more willing to help.”

Sighing, the ambassador stood up, cradling his cup in tanned fingers. “Then I must disappoint you. You’re wasting your time. I don’t have access to any of this. I could try and get you into contact with someone but considering that they refused you right off the bat, reciprocation is doubtful.”

“But you could try?” She’d mirrored him and gotten to her feet, coffee cup empty on the table.

Lips pursed, he looked her in the face, hard and long enough that she began to fidget. This close, in his sudden stillness, she could see the tired droop of his eyes, the paleness of his skin, and suddenly felt quite bad for having barged in on him as she had. On Belonoc, too, of all days.

Finally, he rubbed the space between his eyebrows and nodded. “Alright. Yes. Your address is your name, yes? Wonderful. I’ll get you your contact in… a week, let’s say.” He gestured loosely with his teacup, covering his eyes with his other hand. “Now, please allow me to get my medicine. I can feel a headache coming on.”

“Should I come back to –”

“No, no, unnecessary,” ushering her out the door, he gave her a silly little bow as she stepped over the threshold. “Good day, Miss Han.”

“Oh, um, good –,” the door slammed shut, “– day.”

><

Sitting on a bench, staring as the blue of the foliage shifted like ocean waves above her, she could, begrudgingly, admit that the day could have gone better. The Core embassy was closed for Belonoc – the fact she didn’t find that out beforehand was more proof of the often-suspected fact that scientists were secretly hopeless at research.

She had a PhD. And she hadn’t thought to look up the opening hours of the embassy she’d driven all this way for.

Not only that – after about half an hour of trying and failing to find the barber shop that Josef was waiting at, she had simply made her location public, prayed that no one would decide to take her carelessness as an opportunity to do something wildly illegal, and given up.

A plate of Phat si-io from a local family restaurant – one of those with a legacy reaching all the way back to when humanity still resided on a little planet it liked to call Earth – sat half-eaten on her lap. The robot was supposed to return to pick it back up in ten minutes, and she wasn’t entirely certain her stomach would calm down enough before then for her to be able to finish it in time.

Her attention fractured, then, between the leaves and a sudden influx in high pitched screaming from before her. She lifted her head to it.

A pale, pointy faced girl with braids that coiled around her head like snakes and nipping at her fingers affectionately whenever she brushed her hand near them, stabbed a stick at a second little girl, this one with eyes dark as coal and hair glittering obsidian in the daylight.

Dodging her advances, ignoring the dark strands falling into her eyes, the second yelled, “Fireball! Fireball!”

Sticking out her lip, the first girl dropped her arm. “No fair. You can’t have superpowers. That’s not real.”

“Yes, it is,” rebutted the second.

“Not like that.”

“It could happen!” She put her hands on her hips defensively.

The first girl frowned, “Could not.”

“Could too! My dad had fireballs. Right, Dad?”

Having heard her call, a bored looking man sitting on a bench behind them looked up, nodded once, and went back to playing Snail Shells above a box of shimmering dust, dipping his fingers into it to add or adjust a line in the web of circles and strings spreading out before him.

Throwing him a look, the first girl rolled her eyes and groaned, “Fine, but if you have that, I get force fields!”

The second girl shrugged, and pointed a finger dramatically, “Fireball!”

“Deflection!” Not bothering to so much as indicate a defence, the first girl brandished her stick, “Charge!”

Apparently forgetting about her recently acquired energy output implants, the second shrieked and ran, long hair trailing behind her. Checking how far behind her friend was, high on exhilaration, she didn’t think to watch where she was going. The electromagnetic threshold that separated the park from the swirling waters of the fountain sat in their way.

Han Suyin sat up.

There was a clatter as her father stood, tray of dust sliding off his knees to the ground.

He opened his mouth to warn her, and the world exploded with light.

The first thing she knew was the ringing in her ears. The second was that the bench that was supposed to be under her was now over her. Upon further inspection, she found it had kept her from being impaled by at least three different tree branches.

The earth was shivering with vibrations, the light was no longer as blinding, a child was screaming nearby. It was parental instinct that made her struggle out from under her metallic prison, crawl between the tortured branches of a scorched tree, and emerge into the harsh whiteness of the world beyond.

She was instantly drenched in water.

Spluttering, stumbling away, she saw through the tears flooding her eyes that the fountain had broken open. Despite most of the water in the basin at the time having been evaporated, more rose to take its place, surging out of the unearthed pipelines and onto the tree she had just emerged from.

A sob snapped her attention to her left.

There, where the father had been sitting, lay a tree engulfed in flames, smoking like no tomorrow (which was likely the case for it, anyway). She jogged towards the two shadowy silhouettes crouched before it, a sinking feeling in her chest.

Less than two metres away from them, dust clouds no longer as dark and congealed, she recognised the father in one, the pointy-faced girl in the other, and a third that she had first assumed was just upended bits of earth on its back spread-eagle between them.

Relief flooded her. She took a step closer, and jerked away, frozen in place.

The man’s expression was twisted into a horrific mixture of denial and fear and grief, tears leaking out of his eyes. He touched a shaking hand to the body laying beside him, its dark hair reflecting the lightning in a million brilliant points of obsidian sand.

Han Suyin couldn’t feel her skin. The lightning bank had moved through the city, down the main roads where the stone sat closest to the soil. It left behind it an angry cracked gorge, steaming white and grey and flecks of red. She felt herself whisper something, then ran off to follow it. Where there is disaster, there are people, there is help – a mantra.

Had she turned back to look, she would have seen two pale eyes staring at her, wide and scared, out of a pointed face, adrenalin-drenched snake braids stood up in attention like a pair of horns.

The moment Han Suyin spotted the first the white-panelled robots of the Safeguard, she stopped them in their tracks, and pointed them to the park. She didn’t even need to trick their complex algorithms to get them to listen to her – her violent shaking and frantic gesturing were real enough. One of them even paused to scan her vitals and offered her a pain pill before zooming off. She shoved it into her pocket.

The crowds that had gathered for the midday celebrations of Belonoc, at least, truly reflected the name of the festival now, every one of them covered head to toe in a fine layer of ground stone, vibrant colours of their clothing and hair ribbons washed a pale silver grey. Some whined with pain and nursed their cuts and bruises, others stared blankly into space. She made way for people rushing past, calling the names of friends and family, hands cupped to their faces. Kept her eyes trained on the ground to watch for those laying, wheezing, in puddles of their own blood.

Not even the combined forces of the Safeguard, the med school volunteers, and the Lablun hospital staff – human and machine alike – could keep up with the devastation.

She sank onto a step with a quiet swear, buried her head in her hands.

When, after a long while, she lifted it again, she blinked at the golden bird flying on a tattered red flag, poking out of a window in the now slightly discoloured but still mostly salmon-coloured building across the broken street. A gross, vindictive creature made of validation and wrath slithered through her, settling around her heart. She fixed her gaze to the lower windows, waiting. The curtains rustled once, a bright form flew past the crack, illuminating glass lenses on a greying head.

Bile rose up her throat. Burning with fury, she pushed herself up and speedwalked into a doctor. The lady steadied her before she could fall, and Han Suyin – eyes fixed on the few brown whisps of hair that had managed to escape what she was sure was otherwise a very nice bun – saw her lips part to say something; reprimand her for her carelessness, maybe.

Uninterested, she cut the doctor off, shoving the attractive curly-haired man flier in her face.

“Please,” she begged, grasping the shocked lady’s forearm, “Where is this?”

><

Han Suyin was tired.

All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Stop existing for a while, just for a while. Just until she could see her son again and squish his chubby little cheeks between the palms of her flowered hands.

Why, you ask? Here was why:

One: Her attempt to acquire information was unsuccessful.

Two: She’d lost Josef.

Three: Half of her noodles were eviscerated by lightning.

Four: Blood and Death.

Five: The barber shop and its café, although admittedly quite homey looking, had a steaming canyon drawn through it. By lightning, of course.

Six: Said lightning had hit Josef, who was now in intensive care.

Seven: Someone was going to have tell Olga.

Eight: That someone was her.

Nine: Josef’s craft wasn’t where it was supposed to be and had probably been stolen.

Her head had started throbbing, a dull pain emitting from a bit above the nape of her neck. Popping the pain pill, she took a sip out of a water bottle and went back to glaring at the grooves in the edges of the gaping wound ripping through the café’s pretty white fence.The world kept moving around her, white blotches moving in and out of the comparably narrow band that was her vision, footsteps getting louder then quieter as they receded into the distance.

She acknowledged all of this with a detached sort of awareness. Her attention was focused on her skin, that great organ that covered her from head to toe with the minor exceptions of her mouth, eyes, ears, private parts, and nostrils. She hadn’t thought to activate the implants there before, the ones that parades as simple moving tattoos and were in fact so much more.

There was a voice inside – Reason, probably – that remembered that the city would have overwhelmed them. Dark glittering hair still burned fresh on back of her eyelids.

Fed with her energy, they sang with the currents and humidity, the light intensity and the temperature, the pressure of the world around her. They told her what was before, what was now, what would be in a minute, an hour, a day. Sounds fancy, yes? Reality was much more mundane. Han Suyin, at the ripe age of twenty-one, had taken one look at the requirements of her meteorology MSc. course and turned herself into a portable weather station.

The bank continued to the southern outskirts of the city before stabilising, keeping a steady, crackling vigil over the city like – Han Suyin was sure – a menacing, immaterial matron. Wind from the West indicated warm weather travelling from the anchor island of Mai Ruangphabang (ໃໝ່ຫຼວງພະບາງ), meaning: more storm clouds.

Some small part of her noted the bad news attached to this small fact. The rest, exhausted, sank into the symphony travelling up from her nerve ending into her synapses across her axons to paint a cloudy, everchanging pictures on the translucent canvas of her mind’s eye.

“– yin!”

The pulse of the weather shifted its tempo as quickly and often as the desert skinks hiding under her grandmother’s porch changed their limbs.

“– Suyin?”

Trying to keep her finger on it was like holding a wet bar of soap – difficult and, for no logically discernible reason, viscerally embarrassing.

“Han Suyin,” the voice shook her shoulder, and she refocused her eyes.

The weather forecast playing out across her skin kept on – white noise in the background.

When she finally resurfaced and got a good look at the person crouching in front of her, she frowned, “Marya? What are you doing here?”

Marya frowned back, scanning her from head to foot, the front facing eyes on her Argos’ Necklace wide and alert, golden irises fixed on Han Suyin’s face. There were shadows around all of them, deep and dark as a bruise, and Han Suyin wondered what kind of crazy deep dive Marya had committed to that had her physically exerting a physical copy-based implant to that extent in an overlay-based society.

“Are you okay?” Marya asked, finally.

That did not answer Han Suyin’s question, but fair enough.

“I’m fine,” she nodded, cringing when her voice broke, casting a critical look at the strands of hair sticking out of her friend’s head in wavy, frizzed clumps, her bloodshot eyes, untamed eyebrows, rumpled clothes. “Are you? Are you okay?”

Hilariously taken aback by the question, Marya blinked, tilted her head, and shook out her right hand, flicking her gaze to whatever was making all that ruckus down the street.

She opened her mouth, closed it, looked back at Han Suyin, opened it again, and said, “Nobody is. Do your legs work?”

><

The ruckus was Kieran Cromwell. Specifically, the fist of one of his hands slapping against the palm of the other as he vigorously demonstrated and irritably explained something to a huddle of heavily modified young adults, most of whom looked like they were experiencing deep regret over their career choices.

Leaning closer to Marya, as close as she could get while also struggling to lean on her for support – that is, her lips were brushing the fabric at the shoulder of her tattered suit – she whispered, “What happened to Cromwell?”

Marya hummed. At normal volume, nudging Han Suyin along from where she had come to a stop in the middle of the street, she answered, “The head med-mechanic in on holiday. He’s taking over her job.”

“Oh.”

They watched, intrigued and silently curious respectively, as Cromwell trailed off with his hands on his hips, paused, then nodded and rummaged in his bag for something. He had one of those extra dimension ones, so it took him a while – seeing him up to his shoulder in a small glittery bag, no matter how common a sight, was comical and made Han Suyin giggle – but eventually he fished out something small and shiny. The fake star’s and lightning bank’s combined light glinted off of it.

Taking a step to young man with an antique television flatscreen for a head, he messed around with something on his shirt before turning around and, after some level-headed crowd-scanning, walking to meet the two of them where they had stopped by a surprisingly intact glassware store.

“What did you give him?” asked Marya once he’d gotten within earshot.

Somehow, despite all the dust and grime around, Cromwell’s hair had been entirely unaffected. He shook his head and the last bits of soil and stone slid off it like water off a healthy duck.

He pinned it back, out of his eyes, and answered, voice as soft and ragged as Han Suyin remembered it being, “A temporary title. As long as his boss is gone, he has her authority.”

Chancing a glance back at the lucky man, she saw that the television screen had turned a light pink, a caricature of a blush spanning the screen in warm front-slashing lines. He poked at the badge gently, fingers covered with the same waxy turquoise material Han Suyin saw covering Marya’s hands whenever she holed up somewhere with her manuscripts. The woman next to him, bright ridges of line code running from the crown of her head to her sandalled feet, tapped his shoulder, and he startled. The screen blinked twice to black, then to a colon and a bracket. A smiley face. With a mixture of gestures and what looked to Han Suyin like a 3D tutorial projecting out of the screen, he pointed everyone to different corners of the city, and the group dispersed.

Han Suyin let out an amused huff. At the edge of her vision, blurry and indistinct, Cromwell grimaced and rubbed his nose bridge.

Marya adjusted her hold on Han Suyin’s arm and changed the subject. “Where’s the Doctor?”

Shrugging as if to say: I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to, Cromwell looked up and down the street, then pointed at a dark alleyway. Marya and Han Suyin peered after his finger. Han Suyin sighed.

“No,” said Marya.

“We can talk without him.”

“In there?”

“No cameras. Or sensors.”

Han Suyin heard a quiet forfuckssake whispered near her ear, and reflexively reprimanded, “Language.”

One of Marya’s golden eyes rolled its iris at her, and she frowned, gave it a look. It blinked and closed its lid.

After a long moment of staring resignedly into the dark of the alleyway, Marya shook her head, raised her eyebrows, and to Cromwell proclaimed, “If we get jumped, I’m throwing you into blast range.”

><

They ended up getting jumped by a racoon with dragon-wing implants and water blasters.

After running that out into the street, the alleyway seemed almost cozy. Luckily, none of the other rodents, people, lizards, or legged fish hiding away behind various discarded cargo boxes and rubbish had wings, so the three of them could easily get out of blast range by climbing up the banisters on the side of one of the buildings. Cromwell’s now soggy scarf had been the only casualty.

“It would have been easier to stay in the street,” Marya had grumbled in his direction as she’d stumbled over garden furniture perched on a conveniently placed balcony.

“Walls have ears,” he’d answered.

“Yes, I’m sure interstellar money laundering schemes are quite high on the priority lists of all the people dying of blood loss.”

Cromwell hadn’t responded, and Han Suyin was almost convinced he’d decided to take the high road until she checked his face and found he had, in actuality, taken to staring offendedly at the opposite wall.

“Okay, that’s it.” Now, five minutes into awkward silence, with no sign that the Doctor was coming back any time soon, she decided to take matters into her own hands. “Stop acting like children. Seriously, why are you here? Both of you.”

She was frustrated. She was expectant. And, for once, she thought she had earned the right to show it on her face.

The corners of her mouth twitched once. Marya dragged a finger over the railing and met her gaze. “A group of greedy idiots in Tiếnvan changed the ornithological make-up of the Anchor Islands in order to launder money. We waited years to check up on them. And now everything is going to shit.”

“What?”

Cromwell chimed in, “Because the bird population has changed, the chemical structure of the atmosphere changed as well. It affected the vapours drifting up to Lantern. The epidemic broke out because spices that couldn’t be home grown before can be now…” he trailed off, tapped his head, then added, “A lot of people are allergic.”

“Hold up, wouldn’t that be illegal, then?”

“Why have laws against something that isn’t possible?”

“Precaution?”

“We don’t have laws against necromancy.”

Han Suyin chuckled dryly, sighed, “Right, technicalities.”

A few doctors, accompanied by nurses and robots, entered the alleyway, checking up on all its inhabitants – human or no.

As they were leaving, one of them, dark green goggles covering his eyes like round reflective leaves, looked up to where they were standing. Ginger curls poked out from beneath his white hood, shining freckles dotted his cheeks like constellations. Marya waved at him. He waved hesitantly back, then turned away, jogging to catch up with the rest. His coat blended with the daylight.

“He kind of looks like the captain,” commented Han Suyin.

She looked up to see Marya and Cromwell staring at her – twin judgmental eyes.

A defensiveness rose up inside her. “Not just because he’s ginger.”

Raising an eyebrow, anything he might have said cut off by a sudden decrease in visible light, Cromwell turned to the alleyway entrance. There, bracing himself on the wall with one hand, on his knee with the other, wheezed Doctor Lorenzo Guidice.

Cromwell called out to him, but his voice ping-ponged off the walls, fractured into a million different shards of gibberish. The Doctor’s head whipped in all the wrong directions. Intrigued by the strange man twisting his head around like a pigeon, a ferret’s red eyes blinked from the corners of a food crate.

Confused, the Doctor shouted back, “Han Suyin?”

Blissful bewilderment lasted about two seconds. Suddenly, Han Suyin wished humanity had spent less time fiddling around with disco balls, and more time figuring out an effective way to kick one’s own backside.

Bright and cheerful, the little arrow denoting her, still very public, location, winked back at her from behind her eyelids.

She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Above you, Doctor! We’re above you.”

Finally, he squinted up at them. The tips of his ears glowed a lilac purple in the half light. “So, you are.”

He blinked twice, forehead scrunched in mild befuddlement. Then, tipping his head, gaze flickering from Han Suyin to Marya to Kieran to the little balcony they were cramped on, and back to Han Suyin, he pulled a face, “What in the hell are you up there for?”

“Better ventilation,” quipped she.

“Airborne raccoons,” Marya, already half-over the railing, added.

Cromwell bobbed his head, “It had a nice view.”

Just when Han Suyin had successfully managed to rid herself of the memory of what it felt like to have no idea whether he was joking or not, there it was again.

She’d confided in Marya, once, over tea, about the distress that having a prolonged conversation with him caused her heart, sometimes. The only advice she’d gotten was to choose, every time, whether to take him seriously or to assume everything to be a joke.

“If he won’t set the tone, set it yourself.”

That one interaction had, quite frankly, told her more about Marya than the rest of the time they’d spent together on that spacecraft. Including the fact that Cromwell was just as much of a mystery to her as to Han Suyin, with the marked difference that she was as inclined to care about it as a cat was inclined to stop pushing breakable objects off elevated surfaces.

The only person who seemed to understand him a fraction better than the rest of the mortal population was the Doctor. The captain, who had known him longest, simply found him amusing – leaving Han Suyin to be ticked off and irked by the his peculiar neutralities all by her pathetic, petty lonesome.

Woe is her. So on and so forth… Or something other of the sort.

It really wouldn’t be that big off a deal, except that she’d once heard him talk about throwing himself into the centre of a dying star with the exact same tone of voice. And then, again, in a throwaway dinner table comment concerning the ethics, morals, and legalities of ending society as they knew it.

There was something instinctual that fired off in her brain when he stood near. A part of her that was absolutely convinced that existing near him was a course of action that wouldn’t lead anywhere good.

Not necessarily dangerous. Not intentionally bad or misleading or corruptive. Just not good.

A tall, spiderlike woman, glowing yellow irises set in contemptuous eyes, watched as the Doctor ushered them out, red eyed ferret curled across her shoulders. Turning the corner, swept along by a harried group of five silicon welders and a nurse, Han Suyin saw her stand, dig her fingernails into the wall. The hairline fissures between its tiles flashed dandelion starlight, the tulip on her thumb curled into her palm, then the wall obscured her vision, and both the woman and the alleyway were lost to her.

Marya’s shoulder bumped her back to reality. She followed the trajectory of her finger to Lablun’s crackling vigil.

Captured by its terrible beauty, she felt more than saw the three golden eyes that settled on her face.

“Is that common?” asked her oblivious friend.

Han Suyin couldn’t help it; she laughed. Startled, Marya turned to her.

She drank in the brown of her eyes with gratuity, felt her mouth stretch into a grin. “In the city? Not at all.”

Preoccupied as she was, she didn’t notice – bar a few hairs raising alarm on the nape of her neck – Kieran Cromwell’s slate grey gaze as it swivelled around to rest on her back. It settled there, deep in thought, before finally moving on to the façade of a particularly fancy tea house two streets down. Marvelling at the delicate detail carved into the glass of its window panes, Han Suyin felt her shoulders grow lighter, and paused a moment to ponder why.