slowly eaten by wildcode.
‘You know, I don’t come back here very often,’ Abu says. ‘Perhaps I should. To remind myself how much there is to fix. How much wildcode there is.’
‘Without wildcode we would all be Sobornost slaves already.’
Abu says nothing.
Tawaddud cradles the hot wrap in her hands for warmth.
‘So, what do you think about the stories they tell about the girl from House Gomelez now?’ she asks.
‘What the body thief called you,’ Abu says. ‘Is it true?’
Tawaddud sighs.
‘Yes, the stories are true. I ran away from my first husband to the City of the Dead. A jinn there took care of me. We became close.’
‘A jinn. The Axolotl?’
‘Some call him that. His name is Zaybak.’
‘He really exists?’
That’s what Tawaddud first thought as well: a story come to life, the Father of Body Thieves, who came to Sirr a hundred years ago and became half the city.
‘Yes. But not everything they say about him is true. He did not mean to do what he did.’ She puts the remains of her food away. ‘But if you want a reason to give to my father,
Abu turns and looks away. With his brass eye hidden, he looks terribly young, all of a sudden: for all his wealth, he must be younger than she is.
‘Do not trouble yourself,’ Tawaddud says. ‘I’m used to it.’
‘It’s not that,’ Abu says. ‘There is a reason I don’t come here.’ He touches his brass eye. ‘You asked for my story. Do you still want to hear it?’ His voice is flat, and his human eye is closed.
Tawaddud nods.
‘My parents died in the Cry of Wrath. I stayed with a Banu woman who let me sleep in her tent, for a while. When she found out I could hear the Aun, she sold me to an entwiner. I was six. It wasn’t like what the Council entwiners do. It was forced.
‘I was put in a tank, warm water, no sound, nothing else. Then there was another voice in my head, a thing that had once been a man, a jinn, screaming in pain. Its name was Pacheco. It swallowed me. Or I swallowed it. I don’t know how long it took, but when they let me – us – out, I was thin like a stick. I couldn’t stand. My eye ached. But I could see athar, touch athar. I couldn’t find my way around at first because I got lost in the ghost buildings in the Shadow.
‘And I could hear the desert, the jannahs and the heavens, old machines from the other side of the world, calling.
‘The entwiner was happy. He sold me to a mutalibun party. They took me to the desert to find gogols.’ Abu smiles. ‘Fortunately, I turned out to be rather good at it. Don’t get me wrong, it was not all bad. The mutalibuns’ rukh ship was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, white-hulled, curved like a chip of wood, and as light; the rukh birds carried it lightly and the hunter jinni rode with it like bright clouds. And the desert, I don’t know why they still call it the desert, there are roads and cities and wonders, herds of von Neumann machines, dark seas of the dead, sand that listens to you and makes your dreams come true—’
Abu shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m babbling. None of it matters. I am an ill-made muhtasib, a thing, only half a man. So I cannot love as a man. I wanted to find someone who could understand both the jinn and the man. I thought—’ He squeezes his temples with his wrists.
‘It’s not about that, not just that, you understand. I . . . believe in what your father is trying to do. We can’t just keep pretending the Sobornost is going to go away, and the hsien-kus are much more sane than some of the other ones, so no matter what you feel or want, I’m going to help him.’
Tawaddud swallows.
‘Maybe I should go,’ Abu says.
‘Ssh,’ Tawaddud says and kisses him.
His brass eye is cold and hard against her eyelid. His lips are dry, his tongue unpractised. She caresses his cheek, nuzzles his neck. He sits still like a statue. Then she pulls away, opens her bag, takes out the beemee net and carefully weaves it in her hair.
‘What are you doing?’ he whispers.
‘This is not how it usually goes,’ she says, laughing. ‘Kafur would kill me if he knew.’ She opens her bodystocking at the neck, pulls it open all the way to her navel. She takes his hands and places them on her breasts. She whispers the Secret Name of al-Latif the Gentle, sees its shape before her eyes, focuses on its spirals and recursive twists like she was taught, and the tingle of a beemee connection comes in an instant.
‘You thought to court a woman who has lain with both jinni and men,’ she whispers. ‘You would find that Kafur’s Palace of Stories drives a cheaper bargain than Cassar Gomelez.’
‘I know I shouldn’t have,’ he says haltingly. His hand shakes slightly as he traces the shape of the aureola of her left breast with a finger, gently, uncertainly. The promise of the touch makes her tingle all over.
‘But when I heard the stories—’
‘Stories are things of the evening, not the night, and the night is here,’ she chides, kissing him again, drawing him close, opening his robes.
‘Is there anything I can give you to—’
‘You can tell my father that this is not all I am good for,’ she hisses in his ear. ‘Tell him that I want to serve him like my sister does.’
The beemee hums around her temples. His hands wander down her belly, caress her back.
Abu’s brass eye lights up like a star in the athar. Fire pours out of it and into her, incandescent tongues that tease and burn. She sees her own face, like in a mirror, her lips a circle, her eyes squeezed shut. And then she loses herself in the entwining of Shadow, flesh and flame.
7
THE THIEF AND THE ROUTER
‘What are you going to do when this is over?’ I ask
From our orbit around 90 Antiope, the zoku router looked like a tree with mirror leaves, two kilometres in diameter, floating in space. But inside it is sheer Escherian madness. The processing nodes are blue glowing spheroids, ranging in size from hot-air ballons to dust motes, moving and tumbling in spirals around each other. Polygon-shaped silver mirrors that reflect each other, opening into infinite corridors. But like a vampire, I have no reflection.
‘That’s very narrow-minded of you – the zoku can do whatever they want in the Realms. But another job? Come on. Crime is the only way to make the world make sense. Besides, you are a natural.’
I approach the node with gentle nudges from my quicksuit’s ion drives. I have to move slowly: there is enough bandwidth here to fry an unprotected human many times over. A constant photon storm of fantasy, bent around me by the metamaterials of the quicksuit. I’m invisible and undetectable, a ghost in the machine – as long