the floor. Then he runs, the Green Soldier guiding his steps.
It takes a long time to find the park, but if the calendar was right, there is still time. And there, on the bench, looking down, is his father. Shouting, Matjek runs to him.
Matjek’s father pushes up his goggles, swirls his red cape aside and grins at Matjek. There is glitter around his eyes. His thick blond hair covers his beemee. He swoops Matjek up in his arms.
‘Matjek! What are you doing here?’ He uses the formal tone that means he is on the beemee feed but Matjek does not care, he is having too much fun.
‘I came to find you,’ he says.
‘That’s great. Sit with me.’ He pats Matjek on the back.
‘Have you been reading?’
‘No,’ he says.
‘You should, it’s different from beemee. Harder work, but more rewarding.’ He grins at Matjek.
Then his eyes widen. ‘Is that ours?’ he whispers, not to Matjek, but to someone else.
There is a tiny dragonfly hovering in the air, all gleaming black plastic and metal, a couple of metres away. Its eye lenses are bright.
‘They saw me in the shopping centre,’ Matjek says. ‘It’s kind of pretty—’
There is a clap of thunder and a burst of white heat. Matjek’s father throws them down to the ground. Matjek hits his head and feels his father’s weight falling over him, crushing all the air from his lungs and the light from his eyes—
He wakes up in the garden. Everything feels distant and strange, like a dream. His mother is there, and she seems bigger, somehow. She is not wearing her work face.
‘Can you hear me, little one?’ she says. He nods.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘Somebody tried to hurt your dad.’
‘Why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Lots of people want to
‘What does it feel like?’
‘I don’t know, Matjek. And you shouldn’t worry about that either. Sleep now.’
The lightkraken is there in his room, keeping the room bright and safe from monsters, but it is a long time before Matjek can sleep.
It’s not difficult to get the watson to show him the beemee feeds.
He is
on a beach with his body straining thin fabric in strange places, a cocktail in hand, looking at black shining bodies, smell of chlorine, long fingernails tinkling against glass as he takes out the little umbrella to drink, the sun a hot blanket on his back—
looking at a burning candle with a scalpel in his hand, cutting and the pain is like the skin on his back but magnified, as if focused into one point by a magnifying glass—
a dog running in grass panting panting panting through the spray of the lawn watering system, wanting to bark—
But none of these things are what he is looking for. There are darker corners of the beemee web, and if the watson does not let him in there, there are other ways. He tells the lightkraken to find it for him. It knows exactly what he wants – it used to be a part of him, after all – but it is faster, much faster, and he barely has time to blink and it is already there.
Death
is a hospital ceiling with flaking paint and a Virgin Mary statue clasped between his hands that are like tree roots—
a sip of cognac, right before he loses everything he used to be, and as the alcohol and poison blaze in his belly, he is suddenly so afraid—
a thundering chaos and shards of rock hitting his face and a heavy helmet on his head and then a roaring sound and warmth and then the cold and dark—
He cries, at first. But after a while, the tears leave him and what remains is anger. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that it should be like this.
His mother does not understand. How could she? In the land of the Princess, no one has to die. She has not been there.
And that’s when he knows what he has to do.
It’s not that he needs to bring the lightkraken and the Princess and the others to this world. It’s the other way around.
He sits in the garden for a long time, thinking about it. It feels like there is something inside him, bigger than he is.
They have gathered around him, the Prince and the Green Soldier and the Princess, and the little lightkraken dancing in the air. They say goodbye, and vanish. The Princess comes last. Her hair smells of smoke and her smudged lips beneath the wooden mask are dry when she kisses his forehead.
‘I’ll come back,’ he says. ‘I promise.’
Then he packs his bag, puts the beemee away and leaves to fix the world, before his mother’s next holiday.
‘There you have it,’ Matjek says. ‘Thank you for your company, but it is time for me to wake up and meet myself. The more innocent one you so kindly delivered to me. We will open the jewel together and make things right. And then no one will have to die.’
‘No one will have to die,’ echoes the thief. In the evening light, his features start changing. They flicker through all of Matjek’s faces, all contained within each other, an infinite corridor of mirrors.
‘You did guard yourself well,’ they say, in a chorus that rises like an angry sea, and suddenly it feels like his own mouth is speaking the words as well.
‘But you did not listen. I told you in the beginning. I told you in the end. I am not Jean le Flambeur. You see, the name Josephine here gave to the Hunter was not the thief’s.’
‘You should really be more careful with the things you make, Matjek,’ Josephine says. ‘Little boys should not play with fire. And you should know me better than to think that I would bet all on one gambler, even a high roller like my Jean. I needed an ace in the hole. So I made sure there was one, hiding inside him.’
‘All-Defector,’ says Matjek’s mouth, but his head is already full of mirrors.
‘All-Defector,’ the thing echoes. And now its voice is coming from behind him, dusty and papery and whispering, and Matjek knows that if he just turns around and looks he is going to finally wake up—
29
TAWADDUD AND THE AUN
It is only Tawaddud, her father and Dunyazad who go to the desert, clad in mutalibun robes, rukh staffs in their hands. They leave the city through the gate of Bab, the gate of the treasure-hunters.
They walk in silence across the rough terrain of the Wrath, the angular shapes of buried Sobornost machines, until the proper desert begins. The Shards are a vertical starry sky behind them, against the evening blue.
‘This is the story of Zoto Gomelez, the father of my father,’ says Cassar finally.
‘When Sirr fell, the Aun came to him. The Chimney Princess. The Green Soldier. The Kraken of Light. The Flower Prince.
‘They told him that they used to live in the flesh: they were copied painfully from mind to mind, ghosts and
