City on Fire

he escaped…”

Distaste curls Constantine’s lip. “I know. He demanded new bodies to replace the ones arrested.”

“And there are rumors among the Handmen, rumors that you visit the prisons and interview people who are later released and die of the Party Sickness. All that is necessary for anyone to discover the truth is to put that rumor together with a few other facts, and…”

He turns to face the window again, waves a hand. “Not now,” he says. “There is a crisis, and Taikoen may be needed.”

“Do you visit the prisons, Constantine?”

Constantine gazes at the window with narrowed, defiant eyes. “I don’t anymore. I did, at one point… It seemed best to distract Taikoen with a succession of bodies, keep him occupied. Pay ahead, as it were, on his contract.”

“If this brings you down,” Aiah says, her voice turning hard, “you will have lost everything you have worked for, and you will still be in bondage to Taikoen.”

He looks at her over his shoulder again, plasm displays glittering in his eyes. “Contain it. There is no proof. It is deniable. I need Taikoen now, as I need you.”

“It is not as containable as you think. Even a rumor can wreck you.”

“Enough!” Fury storms in his voice. “I will not hear any more of this!”

Constantine roars from the room, the door crashing shut behind him. Aiah stares after him. Frustration claws at her nerves. And then she looks about in surprise.

/ have driven him out of his own office, she thinks. She drifts toward the side table with the t-grip sitting atop it, brushes the grip with her fingertips. No charge tingles through her nerves; Constantine has switched the plasm off. Her reflection gazes back at her from the polished ebony table.

Taikoen has also driven Constantine away, she thinks, not just from a room, but from the life that he had led. Constantine had tried to work himself up to killing Taikoen, and he’d failed and run, and is still running. Perhaps it is the one great failure of his life, Aiah muses. A failure that he still cannot face.

Aiah takes in a breath, lets it out. Someone, she thinks, is going to have to face Taikoen on Constantine’s behalf.

Startled, she gazes out the window at her own face. It is her image carved in plasm, ten stories tall, looming over the city… and then it fades, replaced by the image of a burning building, of windows shattering as rockets explode nearby… and then Aiah’s image is back, gazing with intensity into the eyeless sockets of a skull wreathed with strawberry leaves.

It is one of the Dreaming Sisters’ plasm displays… but this one is huge, covering half the sky. The sober, evolving images are all of carnage and destruction: buildings in flames, staring corpses, armored vehicles poised over stacks of burning bodies. It’s like all the horrors of the late war condensed into a few seconds, with Aiah somehow woven into it, as if she were somehow key to all the terror… and it’s sad, not simply in the way that images of war are sad, but in the way a composition can be sad, or a chromoplay; it inspires sorrow not as a polemic about war, but as a work of art. Tears sting Aiah’s eyes, and she feels an ache deep in her throat.

The rolling images fade, leaving behind only a lingering representation of Aiah’s face, gazing out over the city with a stricken look that Aiah knows is mirrored on her own, real face, a portrait of her staring at her portrait, half in fear and half in wonder.

ARMIES STAND DOWN

CHARNI SPOKESMAN CLAIMS “MISUNDERSTANDING”

“I got your message,” Aiah tells the woman called Whore.

Whore raises eyelids heavy with dreaming, and with a languid hand she takes the copper plasm contact from her lips. “We sent you no message,” she says, “but we are pleased to see you here. If you will follow me, I will take you to Order of Eternity.”

Aiah tells her guards to wait in the lobby while she follows Whore into the sisters’ stone maze. As she passes through the first doorway she finds a pair of carved images gazing at her in the glow of the hanging lamps, dim light and trompe l’oeil artistry giving the faces a disturbing air of life. She knows the faces, Sorya and herself, The Shadow and The Apprentice, confronting each other across the corridor, one with a knife and the other looking up a recipe.

A metaphor, she admits, sufficient to describe their relationship.

She approaches an alcove where a dreaming sister lies, and Aiah’s nerves sing in surprise as the woman’s eyes open and turn to face the visitor. It is as startling an effect as if one of the imagoes’ eyes had opened. As Aiah continues through the corridor, the sister puts her plasm contact down, rises from her couch, and with a soft slap of bare feet on cool stones begins to follow Aiah along the winding path.

Another imago appears, The Architect, with Constantine’s stern face and powerful body superimposed on the image of the man holding the protractor and a pair of dividers, and with a shiver Aiah remembers that The Architect’s meaning is failure—noble aspirations gone wrong, crumbled into dust.

In the next alcove two sisters lie dreaming. As Aiah passes their eyes open, one set dark and one light, they turn to Aiah with an identical incurious gaze, and after she walks past they rise and follow.

Here is The Shadow again, Sorya’s predator eyes, her ambiguous smile. Another dreaming sister opens her eyes, watches Aiah go by, and then follows. Here is an imago called The Mage, and it has Rohder’s face, lined and youthful at once, lacking only his ruddy complexion. Aiah appears as The Apprentice again, and Constantine as The Architect. Two more dreaming sisters, one of them the genetically altered Avian Aiah had seen earlier, rise from their couch and follow. Aiah, following Whore, feels her neck prickle under the gaze of intent raptor eyes.

More dreaming sisters rise from their couches and follow Aiah, feet slapping on stone, faces impassive as sleepwalkers’.

Death. Aiah’s mind whirls, and she stops dead before the imago. It is Taikoen, a bodiless form, vaguely humanoid, somehow inscribed onto stone, its indistinct outlines fading into the dimly lit scene. As Aiah looks at the image, its contours actually seem to blur and shift, as if the plasm-creature was moving uneasily within its portrait. Terror throbs in Aiah’s throat. She looks wildly after Whore and sees her guide walking calmly away. Aiah almost runs after her.

Rohder, Sorya, Constantine, Aiah, and, stalking them all, Taikoen, Death. The forms repeat themselves again and again. More sisters rise from their alcoves to join the silent, dreamy throng that follow Aiah through the maze. Aiah doesn’t see a single Mage that isn’t Rohder, no Apprentice that isn’t Aiah. And then finally she sees a new face, the dreaming sister Order of Eternity, who waits for her calmly, seated on the mattress in one of the alcoves, legs dangling over the side, crossed at her delicate ankles.

“There is joy in the plasm now,” Order of Eternity says, the words coming in her girlish voice. “We have felt it. There is a change beginning, a change that moves through the heart of reality.”

“I thought you told me that nothing changes,” Aiah says.

“I said that no change is permanent. The change we feel may not last. But it is unlike anything any of us have experienced.” Her pale face lights with joy. “It is as if the plasm were singing to us. Singing of its pleasure.”

“I’ve been using plasm every day,” Aiah says. “I haven’t felt anything different.”

“Perhaps you are not listening.”

“I may not have listened, but I’ve seen,” Aiah says. “You put my face all over the sky, in one of the biggest plasm displays I’ve ever witnessed. Me and war and death. What was that about?”

The dreaming sister hesitates. She looks away, face sober beneath her pale cap of hair. “We have seen you in our meditations. The plasm displays are nothing we do, nothing we create