“You could stop taking the drugs. It would probably help,” The Shadow’s Child said.
“I could.” Long Chau’s tone made it clear that she wouldn’t even consider it. The Shadow’s Child thought for a while, reviewing evidence as she did. Long Chau was entirely right. She was no doctor; merely a small-rank brewer of serenity struggling to make ends meet. And she just couldn’t afford to ignore a customer.
“I could make a blend that would suit you,” The Shadow’s Child said.
Long Chau smiled. “Good. Go on.”
Deep spaces. She hadn’t returned to them since the Ten Thousand Flags uprising—since her entire crew died and left her stranded. The Shadow’s Child hesitated again—a moment only—and said, “I don’t want to be responsible for accidents. With all that you have in your body, I’d want to monitor you quite closely after you drink the blend.”
“I’ll have your bots.”
“Bots won’t be able to react fast enough, with the time differentials. I want to be with you in deep spaces. And it won’t come cheap.”
Long Chau was silent for a while, staring at her. At length, she stretched, like a sated cat. “I see.” She smiled. “I hadn’t thought you’d want to return to deep spaces, even for a price. Not after what happened to you there.”
It was like a gut punch. For a brief, startling moment The Shadow’s Child was hanging, not in a comforting void, but somewhere else, where the stars kept shifting and contorting. The dead bodies of her crew littered her corridors, and the temperature was all wrong, everything pressing and grinding against her hull, a sound like a keening lament, metal pushed past endurance and sensors going dark one after the other, a scream in her ears that was hers, that had always been hers...
“How—” The Shadow’s Child shifted, showing her full size, a desperate attempt to make Long Chau back away. But Long Chau sat in the chair with a mocking, distant smile, and didn’t move. “It’s not public, or even easily accessible. You can’t possibly have found—”
Long Chau shook her head. Her lips, parted, were as thin as a knife. “It is my business to work out things that other people don’t pick up on. As I said—I’m more focused. You hesitated before saying yes.”
“Because you’re a difficult customer.”
“It could have been that. But you kept hesitating afterwards. If you’d simply decided to accommodate a difficult customer, the moment of decision would have been the only time you slowed down. There was something else about this bothering you.”
“It was a fraction of one of your heartbeats. Humans don’t pick up on this.”
“They don’t.” Nothing ventured, again; no hint that she found the silence awkward or unpleasant.
The Shadow’s Child hesitated—again for a bare moment, because what her customers did with her blends was none of her business. But she’d just committed to being in deep spaces again, and that was beyond her short limit of unpleasant surprises for the day. “You haven’t told me what you need to find in deep spaces.”
Again, that lazy, unsettling smile. “A corpse.”
Then again, perhaps she was wrong about the unpleasant surprises.
* * *
The Shadow’s Child was putting the finishing touches to a test batch of Long Chau’s blend. The sweet, intoxicating smell of honeydreamer saturated the room. Two bots clung to the inside of the teapot, taking samples and comparing them to the simulations’ results—almost done...
Someone knocked at the door.
“Go away,” The Shadow’s Child started, and then she saw it was Bao, the woman who collected the rent for the compartment that served as her office and laboratory. Her heart sank. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.” The rent. It had to be the rent. The Shadow’s Child had scrapped together everything she could in the last days of the year and barely met the deadline, but there were few rules where the Inner Habitat families were concerned.
“May I?” Bao asked.
The Shadow’s Child hesitated, but of course Bao would simply be back, if she said no. Bao was polite and pleasant, but unrelenting—which was why the Western Pavilion Le family, who owned The Shadow’s Child’s compartment, employed her.
“Come in,” The Shadow’s Child said. She and Bao had this uneasy relationship, not quite friendship but almost. Bao had been one of the only people willing to risk renting space to a mindship—someone who needed a compartment to receive visitors in-habitat, but who didn’t really live there, physically speaking, whom you couldn’t easily intimidate or frighten with a couple of toughs if the rent wasn’t paid.
The Shadow’s Child had the bots prepare tea, but Bao waved a hand. “I won’t be long.” She pulled up the same chair Long Chau had settled in, and sat, gazing back at The Shadow’s Child, cool and collected. Unlike Long Chau, her tunic was the latest fashion. The calligraphied verses, bold and forceful, came from Ngu Hoa Giang, the current darling of the Imperial Court. Bao’s face was impeccable, with the peculiar smoothness of successive rejuv treatments—and her bots, instead of riding in her sleeves, hung in a jewelled cascade from both her shoulders, an effect that was all the more striking because Bao wore her hair short, in defiance of all conventions. “This is a business visit, in case you had doubts.”
“The rent,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I can pay—”
Bao shook her head. The bots moved, slowly. “You did pay.” Her voice was low-pitched, and confident. She picked up the tea from the bots, breathed it in; but didn’t drink. She never did, when on business. She always said she’d feel personally implicated if she shared
