A fire born of exile, p.21
A Fire Born of Exile, page 21
‘Do Cinnabar Clouds need to be ingested?’ Thiên Dung pulled up the poison sheet, stared at it – a technologist dissecting a problem. Hoà wanted to scream at her that she’d almost died, stopped herself with an effort – forced the feeling away until she could deal with it. ‘I see an injection would work, but would have killed me faster.’
‘Not helping,’ Hoà said curtly.
‘I can tell. I know you’re putting in a lot of effort to be that composed. Honestly, if you want to vent at me and it would make you feel better, go ahead.’
Hoà gave it some thought. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. But thank you.’
‘Any time,’ Thiên Dung said with a shrug. ‘So the poison? Ingestion?’
‘Yes,’ Hoà said. ‘Could it be clinging to your hands from something you’ve touched?’
‘Mmm. I wash my hands.’
Thiên Dung didn’t protest too much. They both knew she wasn’t consistent about doing it.
‘Other clients?’ Thiên Dung looked, curiously, at the deserted shop. ‘Or something we use regularly?’
Hoà tried to remember how Thiên Dung had fallen sick, what she’d been doing. Working on some smaller projects that were overdue prior to the Tiger Games, and just… growing weaker until she couldn’t seem to breathe properly any more.
‘Do you remember what you were working on?’
‘Old Linh’s tea storage box?’ Thiên Dung bit her lower lip. ‘Maybe?’
Hoà pulled up the archives. They didn’t include work hours: just who had paid for what.
‘That was a fairly large job, and you handed it to her just a couple of days before falling sick. Let’s look. Can you do it? I don’t have enough bots.’
‘I noticed.’ Thiên Dung’s voice was dry. ‘We’ll get some more.’
When we get paid. The words hung unsaid in the air.
She could have asked Quỳnh, and Quỳnh would have given them to her without a second thought – but she wasn’t here to be helped by Quỳnh, Heaven forbid.
‘The box,’ Hoà said firmly.
Thiên Dung sent her bots to drag it to the table. Above them was Hoà’s overlay, blinking: the picture of Minh and Oanh’s children and Heart’s Sorrow, like a series of unanswered questions. The ship was Minh’s great-aunt. Minh hadn’t seemed to like Hoà, but…
But she was the prefect’s daughter, and they all knew what the prefect was like.
Hoà’s bots, Thiên Dung’s bots and Quỳnh’s bots mingled for a moment – a few blinks, with data being exchanged on ephemeral links – before Thiên Dung and Hoà looked at each other. Thiên Dung was still pale with exertion, her breath unsteady and her temperature above average. Hoà fought the urge to tell her to sit down, because Thiên Dung was probably about to tell her the same thing.
‘No,’ Hoà said, a fraction of a blink before Thiên Dung did. ‘Was there anything else?’
With the help of their bots, they took a look at everything in the alcoves, every piece of tech they hadn’t handed back to a client – even at the alcoves themselves. Everything was clean. No trace of poison.
That didn’t make sense. How in Heaven had Thiên Dung been poisoned? Hoà called up the recordings of that room aboard the ship, the one where everyone had hung out. She’d left her bag behind, unguarded, so all she had to look at was a centiday or so, those moments prior to putting on the shadow-skin and going aboard the ship. Nothing of interest. A ballet of movements: Oanh’s children, Minh scowling, Heart’s Sorrow being overly courteous and helpful. No significant movement she could see near her bag, and yet…
Yet her bottle had been tampered with, and she was sure it had happened there. She’d always had the bag with her afterwards, including in the shop – because she’d been too preoccupied by the repairs to let it out of her sight.
‘You’re sure you never went to the ship?’ Hoà asked.
‘I think I’d remember!’ Thiên Dung tried to laugh, gave up as her breath seized up.
‘Li’l sis!’
Thiên Dung raised a hand. ‘I have it under control. Mmm.’
‘I don’t know that we have anything under control.’
They had the antidote now, but Hoà wasn’t going to stop trying to fix Flowers at the Gates, which meant their poisoner would try again. Using the same means – which they hadn’t managed to find – or some other approach which they might not be able to counter at all.
‘We should sleep,’ Thiên Dung said. ‘You’ve had a day, I’ve had a day. And everything will seem better in the morning.’
Or we’ll be dead.
Hoà sighed. ‘Let’s make some tea first, shall we?’
‘For sure. I’ll be upstairs.’
Alone in the shop, Hoà watched as Thiên Dung’s and Quỳnh’s bots cleaned up, all the tech being stuffed back into the alcoves, ready for customers. Everything gleamed. Hoà called up the footage again, stared at it. Nothing.
She turned off the lights, and headed upstairs to meet Thiên Dung, leaving Quỳnh’s bots to finish cleaning.
Her sister had fallen asleep by the tea tray, her breathing slow and still laboured. The two cups lay untouched. Her bots waited for Hoà in the darkness, with a simple message from Thiên Dung: ‘Don’t think I can stay up any longer, but you should have some. Pretend I’m awake, and I’ll catch up.’
Hoà’s heart shivered and broke.
‘Oh, li’l sis.’
She sat down, wrapping the blanket around Thiên Dung, bringing up a faint overlay of the night sky above them. She brought the cup to her lips, inhaling the soft floral fragrance of the tea…
Wait.
The two cups didn’t quite look the same. The tea in Thiên Dung’s was slightly different. Hoà had her bots run a comparison: yes, it was cloudier by a fraction, unaccounted for by the tea itself or the minute differences in the ceramic. She picked up Thiên Dung’s cup, sniffed it. It wasn’t just floral: it had that faint metallic aftertaste, like her water bottle. Thiên Dung probably wouldn’t have noticed, but she, exhausted, hadn’t drunk from her cup. Thank Heaven. Thiên Dung was fine.
But how?
Hoà pinged Thiên Dung’s bots, asking for access. They pinged back with full privileges, giving her the recording of the bedroom, which was utterly uninteresting: Thiên Dung’s bots set water to boil and dragged out the tea leaves – and…
There.
At the very beginning, when there were just two cups on the table, in the moment before Thiên Dung settled down – a sliver of smooth, fast movement, a blur of something.
‘Look for that in the other footage,’ Hoà subvocalised. And sat, alone in the darkness, while the bots ran their analysis.
There was that same blur in the room, moving across the walls. Only one thing could move that fast and evade all detection: a bot. Not any bot, but one with official network privileges – belonging to the tribunal, or the prefect’s household.
Minh’s bots.
One in the shop, one on board the ship. No – not just one, because it would have taken more than one to sabotage the ship’s repairs. But the one in their shop was probably just one, because more would have been noticeable. More would have been impossible to hide.
Which meant she was only dealing with one poisoner and killer bot, rather than a swarm of them.
Great.
Hoà desperately wanted to call Quỳnh – because Quỳnh would surely know what to do. But it was late, and she was afraid that Thiên Dung was right: Quỳnh wasn’t discreet enough. And what could Quỳnh do, really? It was just her and the dark, and whatever was trying to kill them both.
It was a bot, which meant it was fast. It was small – but its routines would be limited, and its intelligence circumscribed. In particular, it would be avoiding people, but it wouldn’t be expecting anyone who knew exactly what they were looking for.
What commands had it been given? Poison the food? Or the drinks? Probably whatever it could. It’d be smart enough to recognise and look for anything unguarded. But not smart enough to recognise that Thiên Dung had been replaced by Hoà – since it was still Thiên Dung’s food it was trying to poison. Which meant it hadn’t been updated. Which meant it wasn’t in contact with whoever had left it there.
Good. It had no idea they were on to it and the poison it was using.
And the other thing was – if it was one bot, it meant it was blind. If it was upstairs trying to see if Thiên Dung could be poisoned, it certainly wouldn’t be able to keep an eye out downstairs.
Hoà focused. Quỳnh’s bots were downstairs, still cleaning up. She sent them into the kitchen to unspool lengths of razor-sharp wire, the kind that would cut through human flesh with a single sweep. Then she recalled them into the shop, as if nothing in particular had happened. She’d used a series of instructions on a high-privacy channel, and made it look as though she’d requested more video footage.
Hoà shook Thiên Dung awake.
‘Mmmmf?’ Thiên Dung said, eyes still blurry with sleep.
‘I’m going to make some fried noodles,’ she said, even as her hands made another kind of gesture, the old Serpent one for ‘careful, hold’.
Thiên Dung’s eyes fluttered. She gave no sign she’d seen Hoà move.
‘Sounds nice,’ she said, and fell back asleep.
Hoà sent Quỳnh’s bots ahead into the kitchen, positioning them near the stove. She watched warily as she came down – she’d carefully placed the wires so she could navigate past them, but it was still nerve-racking to have to avoid them in a way that felt natural. By the time she made it to the stove, she was winded with the effort of holding herself still.
A further two of her depleted stock of bots went into the cupboard to look for plates. She made a show of cooking the fried noodles under the watchful eyes of her bots, and then served them in two matching bowls – and left the kitchen muttering to herself, as if she were looking for something she’d forgotten, recalling all her bots to her. One of them brushed against the wire – no no no. Hoà sent it swerving away, almost into the next piece of wire.
Focus. She needed to focus.
Halfway to the door, another bot skidded on the floor, a little too close to a piece of wire. Hoà sent it a fraction to the right – breathing hard – focusing on keeping the other bots elsewhere. She wasn’t sure how long she could hold her mental picture of where she’d placed the wire. She’d just made sure it surrounded the table with the bowls as thoroughly and as finely as possible, but now she needed to make it seem as though it wasn’t there at all, and a mistake would be so easy, and so costly.
Almost there.
Almost there.
The last of her bots made it to her. Hoà let out her breath, and rose, shaking – pretending to be going to the alcoves. She had to trust the bot wasn’t watching her heartbeat, or at least that it wasn’t smart enough to know what to make of its elevated rate. It might know she was afraid but be concerned about the significance of that fear. Most bots wouldn’t, but if it was one of the prefect’s high-end ones…
Hoà waited, heart in her throat.
Silence. Nothing. The bait had been too obvious. She should have known.
She could wait a moment longer. A few more anxious breaths that felt they were burning her throat. She could—
There was a sound, in the kitchen, a silken thing – a soft patter like the shortest of rains – and then nothing. Had it worked? She couldn’t be sure.
Hoà walked to the door, and turned on the lights again – and there it was, a thumb-width away from the bowls, legs half-sheared away, innards glistening in the light. A bot with the seal of the prefect’s house – a hastily repurposed one, judging from the lack of official identification and the haphazard repainting of its body from vermilion to grey.
The prefect’s house. The tribunal. The machinery of the Empire.
This wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she agreed to take Thiên Dung’s place. This—
No. No panic. Not now.
She sent Quỳnh’s bots to respool the wires, and her other bots to dismantle the remaining legs of the lone prefect’s bot. She walked to it and turned it off; it was an easy enough task now that it couldn’t evade her.
Then she sat down, breathing hard, to see what it could tell her.
* * *
‘So, I gather it was an eventful night,’ Thiên Dung said, when she woke up.
Hoà had been up early: she was sitting in the kitchen area downstairs, in the midst of an overlay of a pavilion with a pond, her bots and Quỳnh’s in a tight circle around her bot. She was staring at the wreckage of the poisoner bot.
‘You saw my messages.’
Hoà had sent messages to Thiên Dung, but she’d also received one. It had been there for a while. It was from Quỳnh, and it simply asked: ‘Do you need help?’
She didn’t know what answer she could give to that.
‘Yes. They weren’t always very clear.’ Thiên Dung poured herself some tea, and swallowed three of the pills from Quỳnh’s bottle. ‘A bot?’
‘Several. Some on board Flowers at the Gates. I’m not sure what damage they can do.’
‘Other than poisoning?’ Thiên Dung stared at the bot. ‘That’s—’
‘A prefect’s bot. Yes. But it’s not from the tribunal.’
‘No, of course not. The tribunal would have raided us and closed us down. Poisoning means someone who can’t afford to be caught.’
‘Mm.’ Hoà stared at the bot. ‘It’s not Minh.’
Thiên Dung said nothing for a while. At length, she set aside the teacup.
‘You suspected Minh, and now you feel you’ve been unfair.’
‘Minh was unpleasant,’ Hoà said. ‘That’s not a reason to suspect her.’
‘To be fair,’ Thiên Dung said, ‘when you’re the one being poisoned, people being unpleasant to you do shoot to the top of the list of possible poisoners. So if it’s not Minh, who is it?’
Hoà stared at the bot for a while. ‘The only one who benefits from the ship being declared unfit is the prefect.’
‘But we know it’s not her.’
‘Yes,’ Hoà said slowly, and said it all the same. ‘It’s not her. But she has a wife. And of course, anything that benefits the prefect would also benefit her wife.’
San. Minh’s stepmother. She’d seen her in vids, in holos, by the prefect’s side, always perfectly manicured and stern, unsmiling, except when her own child was running towards her.
Thiên Dung cocked her head, watching her. ‘You don’t know what to do with this information.’
‘No,’ Hoà said. ‘It… It means nothing. I’ve never met her. I’ve seen pictures. Holos. At official functions. In the news reels. But…’ It meant nothing. It felt unreal. Untrue.
‘You feel she should hate us to want to harm us?’ Thiên Dung shrugged. ‘She won’t. Her kind barely even know we exist.’
‘I guess,’ Hoà said.
‘What are we going to do?’
Hoà touched the bot, feeling the sensors under her fingers. She remembered how it had felt to struggle to breathe – the rawness in her throat. She remembered Thiên Dung’s breath hitching, the pallor of her face. She thought of the ship, and of the bots flooding a deserted corridor, trying to speak of the prefect and of Minh – Flowers at the Gate, the same ship that the prefect’s wife would cheerfully kill because she meant nothing. She just stood in the way.
A cold, icy certainty rose in her.
‘You are not going to do anything, but I am.’
And, before she could change her mind, she sent Quỳnh a curt, ‘I know who’s doing it, and I need your help to stop them.’
Chapter 12
Confrontations
When Quỳnh walked into the shop, Thiên Dung – who had been arguing with Hoà – looked up.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you. Please talk some sense into her.’
Quỳnh’s face underwent a number of expressions. ‘I can leave, if you’d rather.’
‘No,’ Hoà said. ‘Please stay.’
They looked at each other. Hoà’s face was burning.
‘What kind of sense am I meant to put into you?’ Quỳnh asked.
Hoà gave up.
‘Thiên Dung knows about us,’ she said. And, on a private comms channel, ‘She doesn’t know you’re Dã Lan, and I’m not going to tell her.’
‘I figured.’ Quỳnh’s voice was wry. She wore scholars’ clothes – not a rich overlay, a subdued one that remined Hoà of her elder sister. Privately, she said to Hoà, ‘Because it would distract her?’
‘Because you don’t want people to know.’
A pause. ‘She’s your sister. I wouldn’t mind.’
The casual trust, more than anything, gave Hoà pause – it was wholly undeserved and gave her the feeling of dancing on the edge of a chasm.
‘I appreciate it,’ she said, colouring. ‘Really. But I don’t think it’s a good time.’
Thiên Dung’s bots made tea and the small, crescent-shaped dumplings of Hoà’s childhood, as Hoà and Quỳnh sat facing each other. For a moment Hoà remembered another time, when she was much smaller and listening to her elder sister and Dã Lan chatting about the merits of scholars. For a moment she felt such nostalgia for their lost home that she thought she was going to burst.
Thiên Dung pulled up a chair and sat, stone-faced, next to them, as Quỳnh’s privacy overlay spread to cover the shop: that vast deserted plain with the white birds flying overhead.
‘Don’t even think of keeping me out of this one,’ Thiên Dung said.
Quỳnh’s voice was mild. ‘You’re one of the victims. You’re owed restitution.’
Or revenge, Hoà thought. She was trying to focus on something.
‘You’ve been to the prefect’s house.’
‘I haven’t.’ Quỳnh’s voice was mild. ‘But I’ve seen her more than once. You haven’t told me what the problem is, exactly.’
Hoà sighed. ‘It’s the prefect’s wife who’s poisoning us.’
A silence. ‘Minh’s stepmother?’
Hoà described, as shortly as she could, what had happened, and then opened up the overlay to reveal the broken bot.
