IF YOU DO, I CAN HELP YOU. AND YOU CAN HELP ME.
SIMPLY SAY THIS WORD ALOUD:
And at the bottom of the letter was a name.
Mishra stared at the letter. Not just because all of this was so odd, but because the words spoke to a deep dread that had been metastasizing within her, this idea that perhaps no state or nation could ever truly succeed in this world. The Continent had been an abomination, and now Saypur, the world’s best chance at a fair, proud, and free democracy, was being ruined by mercantilism and vain, fruitless quests for peace. Ten years into her military career she’d found herself waking up and thinking: We’ll never get it right. We’ll always find a way to cock it all up. Every time. And as her comrades fought and suffered and died, she found herself doubting the point of it all.
To see these thoughts written down before her, no matter how strangely they arrived, was a powerful sensation for her. It felt, for the first time in many years, like she was not alone.
So she took a breath, and read the name aloud.
And then the boy came—he still looked like a young boy back then—and they talked for a long, long while.
Captain First Class Kavitha Mishra has done a lot of odd things for the controller in the years since. There are other members of the Ministry who work for him too—she knows this because she personally recruited some of them—but none of them work as closely with him as she does. He wouldn’t have picked anyone else to send to Bulikov, for example, when they needed to trap that laughing boy, the one who could seemingly appear out of thin air. And though that was her oddest job yet, she suspects he’ll have stranger ones for her in the future.
Especially after Komayd, and Khadse, and whatever in hells happened last night.
Standing in the tunnel, Mishra checks her watch. She takes a breath, then opens the door.
The piece of black paper is still on the floor of the closet. She picks it up and unfolds it.
There are new words on the letter. Just like that first time in her apartment, they seem to be written in black—or perhaps they write themselves on some deeper, hidden part of her mind:
DO NOT ALERT THE MINISTRY YET.
USE THE MIRRORS. WATCH THEIR ACTIONS. REPORT IMMEDIATELY IF ANY MENTION OR MOVEMENT IS SPOTTED, ESPECIALLY CONCERNING THE SUSPECT.
HE IS WITH THEM. HE IS DANGEROUS.
She sighs.
Then she takes a match, lights it on the wall of the closet, and holds the flame to the corner of the paper.
The flames slowly crawl across the black page, turning it into ash. She blows on it a little to help it spread, then stamps it out when it’s finished. Then she climbs back into her auto and drives away.
“Shit,” she says. She hates mirror duty. But an order is an order.
In some ways the modern world now seems very new and advanced to Sigrud. In his day, autos were a rarity, telephones even rarer than that, and pistols and riflings were expensive exoticisms.
Yet in some ways, to his disbelief, it remains absolutely the same. For example, if you were to tell Sigrud that in this very modern, very advanced society, one could still use a forged labor visa—one of the stalwart fallbacks of the intelligence industry, when he was active—to cross the South Seas to Navashtra in Saypur, he would think you a fool. Surely the bureaucracies and authorities must have closed the various loopholes that made such forgeries possible? Surely this new generation, swimming in so much technology and innovation, must have found a way to eliminate this common deceit?
But it appears that the wheels of government move even slower than Sigrud imagined. For he, along with dozens of other scruffy Dreylings and Continentals, is able to painlessly book passage across the South Seas and sail to Navashtra without incident. The various Saypuri officials barely even glance at him. Perhaps Saypur is so hungry for skilled labor that it doesn’t particularly care if a few of those laborers are malicious agents.
From Navashtra, it’s a shockingly simple thing to make it down the coast to Ghaladesh. All forms of transportation, whether roads or boats or trains, inevitably curve toward Ghaladesh, second-largest city in the world, but the undisputed capital of civilization. And though the checkpoints and security measures are higher in Ghaladesh than anywhere else, they’re still not as high as what Sigrud had to go through in service to Saypur’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs—so, to his surprise, they pose no threat to him.
Perhaps this is a world I could have never imagined, he thinks. Perhaps this is a world that is, more or less, at peace.
And then, suddenly, he’s there. He’s walking free and unthreatened in Ghaladesh, the city that, in many ways, has decided his life and the lives of countless others. Because the choices made here, whether about war or commerce, have surely had millions of consequences and casualties apiece.
Sigrud tries not to stare around himself as he walks through Ghaladesh. He is mostly struck by how clean the city is, how organized. Bulikov was a schizophrenic, crumbling mess, Voortyashtan was hardly more than a savage outpost, and Ahanashtan was built specifically to serve the shipping channel, creating a half-industrial, half-urbane hybrid of a city.
But Ghaladesh is different. Ghaladesh, unlike all the other cities he’s ever seen, is intentional.
You can see it when you walk from block to block. From the graceful wooden posts that so many houses sit on to the drains in the street to the curves of the elevated train, you can see how this was not just done well but done just—so. Ghaladesh, he sees, is a city of engineers, a city of thinkers, a city of people who do not act rashly.
Or at least act rashly within their own territory. The rest of the world, well, that he knows is a different story.
He can’t help but marvel at how it flows, how it breathes. How the old stone, commercial buildings downtown flow into the graceful residential sections, where all the houses sit on poles or posts in case of flooding—for Ghaladesh is a city built on the sea, and thus is at constant war with the waters. Perhaps that’s why so much of the city feels planned and designed to a fault. Or perhaps Saypuris, who after all served as slaves to the Continent for centuries, are incredibly, intensely sensitive to the possibility of ever infringing on the life of another. After glancing at the papers, it seems that if someone ever proposes constructing a new building of apartments, Ghaladeshis immediately hold a giant debate about the ramifications and effects of such a building, and whether such effects are acceptable. It is a little too civilized for Sigrud, who was raised in a culture where the person who yelled the loudest was usually considered to be in the right.
He goes to work right away. In this highly organized metropolis, it takes no time at all to find the address. It’s close to the heart of Ghaladesh, in one of the richest and most exclusive areas available. When he gets there he can’t see the house behind the tall wooden walls, but he can tell he’s come to the right place by the Saypuri guards out front—plainclothes, certainly, but he knows soldiers when he sees them.
Sigrud waits for evening, then skulks through the yards of the adjoining houses. No one sees him, no one raises an eyebrow. These are civilized people. They have no need to be watchful of their properties.
He waits on the other side of the walls, listening for a footfall or a sigh. He hears none. They must only put security out front, he thinks. Which is…remarkably stupid. He readies himself, then hops the fence.