Long Chau’s hands were shaking. The bots came out again. They hovered on her wrists, but didn’t inject anything. She spoke at last, saying, simply, “The tribunal questioned me. Extensively. I’m still here. Not jailed or exiled or executed.”
“Like The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen?” The Shadow’s Child said.
“Touché.”
“Talk to me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you got me to come along. Because the least you owe me is the truth.” Because she’d split open The Shadow’s Child like a pomegranate, leaning on old wounds until they bled red and ripe—dissecting her like the corpse in the hangar bay, and then walking away when the problem was no longer of interest.
“Do I?” Long Chau watched her, for a while. The Shadow’s Child didn’t move—cycling between pictures of her pitted hull, of the dark and blackened shape of her motors—of the painting of the Azure Dragons gardens on the front, the one Mother and her long-dead sister had carefully etched.
At length, Long Chau rose from the table. Her hands were still again, her movements slow and careful. There was none of that cooped energy about her now, simply anger. “You’re mistaken. I don’t have to talk to you. I told you before: deductions, not guesses.”
“I’m not you!”
“Patently not. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“You’re just going to walk away?”
Long Chau didn’t even bother to turn.
“I’ll tell them,” The Shadow’s Child said. “The house.” And then she stopped, for why would they trust her more than they did Long Chau?
“Feel free,” Long Chau said. And she walked out, without looking back.
* * *
When she got back to her office, the lights were still on, and the remnants of the abortive interview with her previous customer were still on. The bots scattered across the floor, picking themselves up when she entered, the activity map automatically opening up for her to check.
She didn’t feel like any of that.
A sixteen-year-old girl.
She’d thought Long Chau was prickly and uncaring, but that was something else.
Control, Sharpening Steel into Needles had said. A currency you’ve always been short of.
Currently, she had so little she could have laughed. Or wept, or both.
In the end, she did the only thing she could think of, though it was neither pleasant nor relaxing: she called Bao.
Bao took the call almost immediately. She was in her office, in the midst of immaculate bookshelves with carefully aligned books, all matching editions, battered and creased. “Ship?” Wary surprise.
The Shadow’s Child said, carefully, “It’s not about the rent.” It was, in a way—because Long Chau was no longer going to be paying her, because she’d wasted all that time on an investigation she couldn’t trust when she should have been taking care of her pitifully few customers—but she couldn’t tell Bao that. Not now.
“Oh?”
“I need some information,” The Shadow’s Child said. “On an Inner Habitat family.” She saw Bao shift, and said, “Not the Western Pavilion Le.”
Bao relaxed a fraction. No conflicting loyalties, then. The book on her desk was physical: yellowed with age, stained with brown like an old man’s skin. It looked like one of the cheap editions of an early Lao Quy, The Jade and the Deer, something that didn’t actually have that much value except sentimental. “Why not. Ask.”
“Tran Thi Kim Oanh,” The Shadow’s Child said.
“The Golden Carp Tran.” Bao watched her, carefully. Her bots moved, like the swaying branches of a willow tree. “That’s old history. What’s the interest?”
“It came up,” The Shadow’s Child said.
Bao raised an eyebrow. “Really.”
She—she was going to have to give something, or she’d get nothing. “The teacher. I think—” Far, far away in her heartroom, she tasted bile. “I think she’s one of my customers.”
She’d thought Bao was going to mock her about morality, but instead the woman’s face went still: a truly unsettling effect, because it’d had very little expression to start with. “It was a sordid affair,” she said, finally. “It made a big impression in high society when it happened. Kim Oanh was sixteen and rather sheltered. You know how those things go. She wanted more of life; her family wanted to keep her safe, and to ensure the best future for her.”
“And her teacher?”
“The teacher was arrogant.”
What a surprise. “Trouble with the family?”
“She’d gone past some lines, yes. Following her own ideas and reproving the elders as if she weren’t a subordinate years their junior.”
Typical Long Chau—seven years ago, and not so different. “I’m surprised they kept her on.”
“The eldest grandmother liked her. There were... many arguments on the proper behaviour, which slowed things down. And before they could dismiss her—”
“Kim Oanh vanished.”
“Yes. It was the birthday of the family’s eldest grandmother, and everyone had gone to pay their respects. Kim Oanh was sick and it looked contagious, so she was meant to attend through the network, with the teacher keeping an eye on her. When she didn’t come on, they came back in a panic. She was gone, and the teacher professed not to have noticed anything.”
An obvious suspect. “I assume the militia looked.”
“They did more than look,” Bao said. “Nothing conclusive came up, but—” she hesitated.
“Go on,” The Shadow’s Child said. It could hardly get worse.
“Several months after the investigation closed, your teacher came into possession of rather too much money. It was traced back to people smugglers.”
“Slavers.” She kept her voice flat, emotionless. She had to, or she’d burst.
“I don’t know,” Bao said. “The tribunal didn’t find any conclusive evidence it was tied to Kim Oanh.”
“The family would have pressed,” The Shadow’s Child said. Surely many rules could bend and break, when money and influence were involved?
“They did,” Bao said. “The magistrate is a stickler for rules, and they didn’t appreciate their hand being forced in that clumsy a manner. So
