The Fractal Prince

know who your boss is, and what she wants. The stakes are high enough for the Founders and Primes to take notice. This whole affair – it’s part of some conflict between them. And we are right in the middle of it.’

‘Thanks to you,’ Mieli says.

‘Touche,’ the thief says. ‘So. Can we run?’

The damage from the battle with the knife-flower is superficial, and Perhonen is already fixing it. But she knows exactly what her ship can and cannot do. The fear needles of the battle are still in her belly. She finds herself clinging on to their sting.

‘No,’ she says. ‘But we can fight.’ Perhaps this will be a good way to end things. Fight an unbeatable enemy, hope for a honourable death.

The thief looks at her incredulously. ‘As much as I have come to respect your ability to kill things,’ he says, ‘I’m starting to wonder if Oortian schools teach basic mathematics. Just one of these things nearly killed us. Are you sure fighting a few thousand is a good idea?’

‘This is my ship,’ Mieli says. The jewelled chain around her leg feels like it’s burning. Sydan. Could it not be another me who gets her back? She closes her eyes. ‘It’s my decision.’

Mieli, whispers Perhonen. That was really tough sobortech. I expended a lot of weaponry on Mars. We are good, but we are not that good. What are you doing?

‘Mieli?’ the thief says. ‘Are you all right?’

Mieli takes a deep breath of the stinking air. She opens her eyes. The thief is staring at her with a look of concern. ‘Come on,’ he says with a soft voice. ‘Let’s think about this. There is always a way out.’

‘Fine,’ Mieli says finally. ‘What do you suggest?’

The thief is quiet for a moment. ‘It seemed to want me pretty badly,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can use that.’

‘Make a gogol of you and sacrifice it?’ Mieli says in disgust.

A cloud passes over the thief’s face. ‘No, that’s not possible. Looks like Josephine does not want more than one of me running around. There must be something else—’ His good eye flashes. ‘Of course. I’m an idiot. That’s what it’s for. If the cop thing wants me, I need to become someone else. I need a new face.’ The thief tries to scratch the red ruin with his missing hand, then looks at the stump in dismay.

‘Not to mention some other bits and pieces. But I think I know where to find one. If Perhonen is right, we have less than two days to open the Box.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’ Mieli asks.

‘How is anything really important ever done? With smoke and mirrors.’

‘No games, Jean. Please.’

The thief gives her a broken smile and takes out a small amber egg from his pocket. A zoku jewel.

‘How quickly can you find us a zoku router?’

6 TAWADDUD AND THE GHUL

The district of the Banu Sasan lies around the Sobornost Station. It used to be the Sobornost model city: high, heavy buildings, squares, statues, upload temples. But ever since the Cry of Wrath, they have stood mostly empty, apart from the logistics hubs where the otherworldly goods Sobornost trades for gogols are distributed to those who can afford them. And it is here that the small and the weak of the city hide from wildcode.

Tawaddud watches Abu carefully. She would have expected the gogol merchant to turn his nose up at the dirt and the poverty but, instead, he wears a look of detached fascination, even when they pass the Takht al’Qala’a square, where the spider woman lives. She has spun a huge tent of spider silk from the glands the wildcode has grown in her breasts. Little statuettes and jinn bottles hang from the wispy strands, like strange fruit.

The air is dry, with the faint smell of ozone everywhere, mixing with the pungent odour of unwashed bodies. There is music, shadow-players who create images on the sides of high pillars, cafes with old men with faces marked by wildcode playing chess. Chimera acrobats in silk robes, sapphire-enhanced muscles gleaming.

Abu stops to give a few sobors to a man who has a chimera beast in a cage, a fetus-like pink thing the size of a dog, with a blue transparent shell and sharp spider legs. The man bows to him many times, loudly proclaiming to his audience that the creature is a prince of Fast New York, transformed into this shape by the Aun, and that it understands holy texts. It spells out answers to questions with a sharp tap-tap-tap of its legs on concrete. In the athar, Tawaddud sees the chains that make the creature an extension of the handler’s mind.

‘You should be careful, Abu dear,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to become one of my patients.’ And no doubt you have jinni bodyguards following us that would stop you if you tried to do anything stupid.

‘What a terrible fate that would be. I’m sure there are those who go to the desert just so they can be treated by you.’

‘I warn you: my medicines can be bitter.’ She pats her doctor’s bag.

Abu looks at her curiously. ‘Why do you do it? Come here, I mean.’

‘Perhaps you will see, before the day is over. What do you make of the Banu Sasan?’

Abu smiles. ‘I grew up here.’

Tawaddud blinks. ‘That is a story I would like to hear.’

‘Too long to be told on an afternoon walk, I’m afraid. I do not speak of it often: it is difficult enough for me to deal with the muhtasib families without being a Soarez, Ugarte, Gomelez or Uzeda.’ Abu spreads his hands. ‘No matter how many gogols my mutalibun bring back from the desert.’

‘So, in your position, a wise man would be looking for the hand of a younger daughter of a muhtasib House? Even one with a . . . less than perfect reputation?’

Abu looks down. ‘I had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon with a beautiful woman without discussing such things.’

There is such sadness in his human eye that Tawaddud almost tells him the truth: that he should never marry a girl who loves only monsters. Then the wound left by Duny’s smile stings again. I am going to show Father who I really am. But not like she thinks.

Tawaddud touches Abu’s shoulder lightly.

‘You are right. Let us leave marriages and Houses up on the Shards, where they belong. Here, no one cares who we are. And that is one reason why I come here.’

As always, Tawaddud sets up her practice next to a defaced Sobornost statue – a bearded man with a machinist’s tools, now covered in athar scrawls and patches of wildcode.

As Abu watches, Tawaddud unfolds her stall from her bag: components that open up into spindly structures like giant insect legs. She turns them into a tent with a small table and a bed. She spreads out her gear and the jinni bottles. Almost as soon as she is finished, the patients start coming.

They line up outside the tent and, one by one, Tawaddud does the best she can. Most are simple hauntings, easily dispelled. Actual wildcode infections are more difficult but, fortunately, the ones today are not too bad. Merely a boy who has glowing v-shaped dashes all over his skin, chasing each other, moving in flocks like birds. He claims they are ancient symbols of victory and would like to keep them, but Tawaddud points out that they will grow and take over his skin entirely.

She studies the boy with athar vision, gently cupping his face.

‘You have been in the desert again,’ Tawaddud chides. The boy twitches, but Tawaddud grips his face firmly. ‘Let me see.’

She takes one of the little jinn bottles from her belt, opens it and lets the software creature out, a cloud of sharp triangles in the athar.

‘I thought I told you not to go there,’ she says.

‘A man needs to have a dream, my lady, and the dreams are in the desert,’ the boy says.

‘I see you are going to be a poet next. Hold still.’ The little jinn eats the wildcode in the boy’s frontal lobe. ‘This might hurt a little. But if you don’t stay out of the way of the mutalibun, you are not going to be much use to anyone.’