“Input,” he said aloud. “Housekeeper systems.” The words caught in his chest, the lack of air catching him by surprise. He coughed, hard, the spasm driving painfully deep. His mouth filled with phlegm that tasted like bitter copper; he spat it into a sheet of tissue, and saw the familiar thick white laced with a froth of red. That was answer enough. “Cancel,” he whispered, voice harsh and strange to his own ears, but the room responded calmly.

“Input canceled.”

Ransome scowled, hating the sickness, hating the fact that his systems remembered that choked voice as his own, and pushed himself up out of the chair. The injector lay on the shelf where he kept the story eggs’ shells. He went to get it, feeling the too‑familiar giddiness, laid the cold tip against the veins of his neck as he had been taught, where the skin was more or less permanently reddened from the injections, and pressed the trigger. The machine stung once, painfully, and he imagined he could feel the drug spreading like cold fire under his skin. The doctors swore it was a hallucination, a common side effect. It felt real enough, and he stood for a long moment, waiting, eyes fixed on nothing, as the chill spread through his chest and down his right arm, and the pain eased and his breath came easier, the rattling in his lungs fading slightly. It had been three years since the maintenance drugs, the ones that had kept the white‑sickness at bay, had failed him, as he had known they would: five to seven years, he could expect the injections to work, and then he was dead.

Ransome stuffed the injector into his pocket, made himself shower and shave and find a clean shirt and jerkin, going through the motions until the fear and anger had retreated again. White‑sickness was common in hsai space, a common killer of jericho‑humans; it was also incurable, though onset and death could be delayed for decades with the right drugs. It was just his bad luck to have shared a cell with a carrier, back on Jericho. My mistake to have been on Jericho at all, to have worked for the Chrestil‑Brisch in the first place… He shook the thought away, and glanced for a final time in his mirror. He was looking haggard– too little sleep; nothing new–but the hectic flush from the injection still burned on his cheeks, two ugly, fake‑looking spots of red. The black jerkin and trousers and the loose white shirt had been meant to complement his usual bone‑white pallor. He suppressed the instinct to rub his face, to scrub the red away, and reached instead for the handful of carved stones waiting on his workbench. He slipped those into his pocket, and left the loft, double‑sealing the palmprint lock behind him out of habit.

His flat was one of a dozen in a converted warehouse, purchased cheap by one of the artists’ cooperatives now that most cargoes moved through the new Junction Pool cargo lifts rather than the long way around, from the ramps at Dry Cut along the Old Coast Road that skimmed the cliff edge. The old warehouse districts were no longer convenient, or profitable; the buildings that had not been converted to other uses–ght manufacture, particularly, and in this district the embroiderers’ shops that made the embellished fabrics that were Burning Bright’s primary export product–stood empty, their windows cracked, frames emptied by last year’s Storm. The lift was occupied, as usual–there were enough heavy‑materials workers in the building to ensure that the single lift was always in use or out of order–and Ransome made his way down the side stairs. It had been a fire access once, running along the outside of the building, and the outer wall was pierced at intervals by narrow panels of wire mesh. The air that flowed in was soft and heavy with the salt smell of the canals, and warm with the promise of Storm. There were more signs of approaching Storm in the corners of the stair, or at least of the Carnival that took up most of the two‑week period: a raki bottle stood empty on each landing, and the lowest level, where the walls were solid to prevent unauthorized access, stank of urine. Ransome made a face, and stepped carefully over the puddles to unlock the gate.

The alleyway was crowded with denki‑bikes and two‑and three‑wheeled velocks, the latter chained to anything substantial enough to defeat a standard wirecutter, the denki‑bikes clustered around the charging bollards, a blue haze showing where the security fields intersected. Ransome reached cautiously into the tangle of cables and locks to free his own machine, and winced as the fizzing security stung his fingers. Then he backed the bike out of the tangle–for once without setting off someone else’s security system–checked the power reserve, and climbed aboard. The machine was woefully underpowered, for his taste, but it was serviceable, and better than the tourist‑trolleys. He edged the throttle forward–the bike whined and shivered–and let it carry him sedately into the traffic stream.

He took the short road to the Ghetto where Chauvelin lived with most of the rest of Burning Bright’s noncitizen residents, skirting the cliff edge above the delivery basins of Junction Pool, then cutting straight through the industrial zone past the spaceport at Newfields. A column of smoke and steam hung in the distance, the winds slowly bending and fraying it to nothing: someone was saving money on launch costs, flying chemical rockets. The pilots who ran the orbital shuttle would be cursing, Ransome thought, and smiled.

The ambassadorial residence stood on one of the highest points in the Ghetto–on all of the Landing Isle, the largest piece of the original landmass: the hsai liked heights, and most of Burning Bright’s inhabitants didn’t care. The household staff had been told to expect him. Ransome paused at the gate only long enough to identify himself–most of Chauvelin’s household knew him by sight, after nearly fifteen years in the ambassador’s service–and then a pair of hsai servants came out of the main house to meet him. The male took the denki‑bike, and the hsaii–Chauvelin’s steward Iameis je‑Sou’tsian, Ransome realized with some surprise–bowed politely.

“Sia Chauvelin has asked me to bring you directly to the garden,” she said, in tradetalk, and Ransome answered in low mian‑hsai.

“I’m honored by the courtesy.” And very surprised by it, he added silently. What the hells is going on, to make me rate this treatment? He followed without question, however–he knew better than to ask that question–and je‑Sou’tsian brought him through the sudden cool of a service passageway, bypassing the main house, and led him out as suddenly onto a path that ran between tall walls of flowering hedge. Ransome blinked, momentarily confused, then oriented himself. This was the maze, a part of the garden derived from hsai tradition, and one that Chauvelin rarely used. Je‑Sou’tsian followed the turns without hesitation, however– maybe it is true, Ransome thought, that there really is only one pattern in use on all the worlds of HsaioiAn–and let them out through a red‑lacquered gate onto the carefully landscaped lawn of the upper terrace. Chauvelin was waiting a few meters away, seated comfortably in the shade of a bellflower tree, a luncheon tray beside him and a data manager resting in his lap.

“Na Ransome is here,” je‑Sou’tsian said, and the ambassador looked up with an abstracted smile.

“Ransome. Join me, why don’t you?” To je‑Sou’tsian, he added, “Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“Yes, sia,” the steward answered, bowing, and backed away.

Ransome made his way down the terraced slope, stepping carefully around the elaborately casual plantings. He was very aware of the ambassador’s residence looming behind him, the sunlight polishing the white‑stone walls and glinting off the long windows. It felt unpleasantly as though someone were watching him, and he seated himself deliberately on the wall that overlooked the lower terrace. Chauvelin glanced up at him, gave a quick smile, and Ransome smiled rather wryly in return. If it had been the cliff wall, overlooking the hundred‑meter drop to the Old City, he would never in a thousand years have settled himself there, especially with Chauvelin sitting less than two meters from him, and they both knew it.