“Like hell I expected to see you, old partner.” She leans forward. “It’s been—how long? A decade. Feels like it’s been a lifetime.”
In a way it has. We first met in a dark basement that stank of waste and dead children. Recadat Kongmanee, my junior and later partner, had tracked down the perpetrator but was disabled and captured during her attempt to rescue a dying boy. One of my first cases; my colleagues pitied me for it, the poor transfer saddled with this. But I’ve never been squeamish. My wife used to say I was hewn of granite, inside and out. Granite, steel, titanium. In time I was compared to every hard, unyielding thing. “How have you been doing?”
“How have I . . . Ayothaya’s at war, I’ve been having a bad fucking time; barely made it out.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad you did too, though I shouldn’t be surprised—if anyone’s a walking masterclass in survival, it’s you. The immortal Detective Thannarat. The war is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
The invasion and occupation of Ayothaya. Her world and mine, the place that gave us birth. “After a fashion.” A catalyst that made me realize there was nothing keeping me on Ayothaya save regret and inertia. “Is that what brought you to Septet?”
“I found out about this place a while ago. It sounded like a deranged urban myth, but I had to try. No one’s going to come save Ayothaya, and I’d like to have a planet to go back to.” Recadat adjusts the lapel of her jacket unnecessarily, an old tick. “My performance in the game hasn’t been . . . ideal. And now I run into you, of all people.”
“How non-ideal?”
She grimaces. “Ten years didn’t make you any less blunt. Fine. I lost my regalia—my AI partner. It’s left me in a situation.”
An untenable one. Looking at her again I can see the signs of attrition, the desiccated look that comes with sleep deprivation: she must have been sleeping with one eye open and a gun on the nightstand. When we parted she was young, just thirty-two. Forty-two now; time goes by in a flash. Once I’d have done nearly anything for her, but they’re old embers. Even so I add, “I can’t make promises yet, but I’ll help you as much as I can. There’s plenty we can do for each other.”
“Yes. And—I trust you. I know you can do anything.” Her voice grows fervent. “It’ll be like old times. Except we’re not solving petty cases, we’re saving the world.”
The way she looks at me, those bright eyes full of certainty even after this long, as though I haven’t been absent from her life and career for an entire decade. It always surprised me. I never did anything to earn such loyalty.
By the time I found Recadat in that basement she was in pieces—most fingers on one hand missing, one foot bludgeoned to gristle and pulp, one knee shattered completely. She’d gone in and out of consciousness.
The perpetrator had been pursued by public security for a year, and had meant to return her to us as a statement. Back then I did not take interest in the psyche of the perpetrator, why he did not just breach but entirely obliterate the social contract; why he abducted and dissected children, or why he tortured Recadat. I simply shot him in the head, and there was much paperwork to fill after the fact, though Internal Affairs eventually let me off the hook. That night I’d saved very little. I had carried Recadat out as hardly more than a bloodied human torso. Her therapy to get well again, in body and spirit, took close to two years. I visited her every day.
“Brief me on what you’ve got.” I finish my abalone and drain my chrysanthemum tea. “Just like old times.”
Recadat enters her suite to find it submerged in gloaming, close to pitch-black. She doesn’t bother trying to access the room’s controls, knowing she would be prevented in any case. The layout is familiar enough, by now, that she is in no danger. In the dark she takes off her jacket, folds it, hangs it on the back of a chair. For a time she sits and closes her eyes, counting her breaths. Any unpredictable event can be met as long as she knows the rhythms of her body; any setback or obstacle can be borne as long as she is anchored by her goals. She thinks of Ayothaya’s riverbanks, their endless flowing wealth. On her world rivers are goddesses and the soil itself deific. Every root and fruit and rice grain bears a fragment of the divine.
A hand alights on her jaw. “And how did it go with your mentor, my jewel?”
She tenses. Then relaxes. Her lover’s touch always has this effect, an electric current—a shock to the nerves before she remembers what else it entails, the rest of what it can bring. “As smoothly as can be expected. I didn’t think she would be here. They made the Court of Divide too attractive. Too much carrot, not enough stick.”
A susurrus like scales against velvet. Her lover is sheathed in serpentine accoutrements, in leather that bends as supple as though it is attached to a live animal. “How much did you tell her?”
“You know how much. And how much I didn’t tell.” The careful balance. Recadat did not tell a single lie, not exactly. Thannarat was once her world, more than Ayothaya itself, more than anyone or anything else. The intensity of passion she felt back then, the lingering regrets after her partner quit the force and disappeared into the fringes of law. Never quite criminal but on the switchblade’s edge, a margin so thin there was barely any difference.
“But you didn’t tell her about me.” Their voice is low and amused, not
