Bow down.
She reaches the woman, twists a wrist that has gone limp. The gun clatters to the ground. That’s the only sound in the growing silence—that, and the woman’s ragged breath. The appeaser within Ai Thi relaxes, slightly. She can feel their disapproval, their fear. Cutting it too close. She could have died. They could have died.
Ai Thi lifts the woman to her feet, effortlessly. “You shouldn’t have done this,” she says. “Who sent you?”
She hasn’t expected an answer—the woman’s mind should still be filled with the single message the appeaser used to drown all cognitive function—but the thin, pale lips part. “I sent myself. You—you starve us, and expect us to smile.”
“We all sacrifice things. It’s the price to pay for safety,” Ai Thi says, automatically, and then takes another look at the woman. All skin and bones—Ai Thi is strong from training, but the woman hardly weighs anything, and her cheeks are far gaunter than even those of menials— and, as she looks into the woman’s eyes, she sees nothing but raw, naked desperation, an expression she knows all too well.
Who sent you?
I sent myself.
Two years ago, an eternity ago, Ai Thi looked at that same gaze in the mirror, working herself down to the bone for not enough money, not enough food, going to bed hungry every night and listening to Dieu Kiem’s hacking cough, and knowing that no doctor would tend to the poor and desperate. She made a choice, then: she volunteered for implantation, knowing she might not survive it—volunteered to serve the Everlasting Emperor in spite of her doubts. But, if she hadn’t made that choice—if she’d let fear and frustration and hunger whittle her down to red-hot rage—
This might have been her, with a gun.
Ai Thi is meant to call for the enforcers, to turn the woman over to them for questioning, so that they can track down and break the dissident cell or foreign agency that sent her. That would be the loyal, righteous thing to do. But …
But she’s been here. She knows there’s no cell—merely the end of a road; a last, desperate gesture that, if it doesn’t succeed, will at least end everything.
Ai Thi walks back to the barracks with the woman over her shoulder—by then she’s all spent, and lies in Ai Thi’s grip like wrung cloth. Ai Thi lays her down in an alcove before the entrance, a little out of sight. “Wait here,” she says.
By the time Ai Thi comes back, she half expects the woman to be gone. But she’s still there, waiting—she sits on the floor with her legs drawn against her, huddling as though it might make her smaller.
“Here,” Ai Thi says. She grabbed what she could from the refectory— couldn’t dally, or she’d be noticed: two small rice cakes, and a handful of cotton fish.
The woman looks at her, warily; snatches all three things out of her hand.
“Go gently, or you’ll just vomit it.” Ai Thi crouches, watching her. The appeaser within her is quiet. Curious. “It’s not poisoned.”
The woman’s laugh is short, and unamused. “I didn’t think it was.” She nibbles, cautiously, at the rice cakes; eating half of one before she slips the rest inside her sleeves.
“What’s your name?”
A hesitation, then: “Hien Hoa. You’d find out, anyway.”
“I don’t have supernatural powers,” Ai Thi says, mildly.
“No, but you have the powers of the state.” Hoa stops, then; afraid she’s gone too far.
Ai Thi shakes her head. “I’m not going to turn you in. I’d have done it already, if I was.”
“Why—”
Ai Thi shrugs, though she doesn’t quite know what to say. “Everyone deserves a second chance, I guess.” She rises, ignoring the twinges of pain in her muscles. “Stay out of trouble, will you? I’d hate to see someone else bring you in.”
Straying from the Everlasting Emperor’s path is a grievous misconduct, but every misconduct can be atoned for—every fault can be forgiven, if the proper amends are made, the proper re-education achieved.
To Sergeant Bac, at her debriefing in the squad room, Ai Thi says nothing of Hoa. She heads next to Captain Giang’s office, for her weekly interview.
The captain sits behind her desk, staring at the aggregated reports of her company, nodding, from time to time, at something that pleases or bothers her. On the desk before her is a simple am and duong logo, a half-black, half-white circle curved in the shape of an appeaser: the emblem of the harmonisers. “I see your last check-up was three months ago,” she says.
Ai Thi nods.
“You’re well, I trust?” Captain Giang says—only half a question. “No stomach pains. No headaches that won’t go away. No blood in your urine.”
The danger symptoms—the ones Ai Thi could recite by heart—a sign that the delicate symbiosis that links her and the appeaser is out of kilter, and that they could both die. “I … I don’t think so,” Ai Thi says.
Giang looks at her, for a while. “You don’t look like yourself,” she says, frowning.
She knows. No. There is no way she can know. Ai Thi draws a deep, ragged breath. “There’s much unease,” she says, finally, a half-truth. “People are … taut. Like a string about to snap.” And there is only so much slack the harmonisers can pick up, only so much wisdom they can dispense to people whose only thoughts and worries are what they’ll be eating come tomorrow.
“I see. Why do you think that is?”
Gaunt eyes, and Hoa’s thin, bruised lips, and the careful way she’s hoarded the food; for giving to someone else. Ai Thi says, finally, “May I speak freely?”
“Always.” Giang frowns. “This isn’t a jail or a re-education camp. We trust your loyalty.”
Of course they do, and of course they can. Ai Thi would never do anything against the Everlasting Emperor: he keeps the fabric of society together. “The
