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  “If this was perpetrated by the Artisans, the company can’t keep quiet. The truth will emerge,” the elder man began.

  “Artisan involvement is neither confirmed nor denied,” said her mother. “I thought the Archer’s Ring, Signet, and Anium defeated them years ago. We all believed it.”

  “Well, in the worst-case scenario—and I pray with you that it won’t happen—the union would like to bring your attention to the war exclusion clause in the miners’ insurance policy.”

  He looked pale and soft in the middle, and Pleo wondered when he had last set foot in a mine. She had caught his name as Erden.

  “I’m well aware of it. So what?” her mother snapped.

  “Now would be an opportunity to seek to overturn it. With your involvement, as Idilman Tanza’s wife...” Erden hesitated.

  Hesitation is your mistake, thought Pleo. She wanted to shove manti dumplings filled with ground glass down the men’s throats.

  “We all have shares and stakes with CIM, but you two have nerve! You won’t even wait for the inquiry,” fumed Guli, sweeping up the cups of half-finished tea.

  She threw the union men out of the house. Afterwards Pleo asked her mother to get more sleep.

  “I’m too tired to sleep,” was the reply.

  Pleo was not convinced. Her mother was tired of being trapped in stasis by the ongoing radio silence from Chatoyance Industrial and Mining, unable to move or live until all of Blue Taro and Boxthorn received confirmation: dead or alive.

  When the visits had stopped during the wee hours Guli took to grinding salt in the living room until sunrise. According to miners’ custom, if Idilman Tanza’s name was not among the dead the salt was to be scattered outside the front door of the Tanza container home to ward off further bad luck. If he was confirmed dead, Guli was to fill a table lamp with the ground salt and light it for forty-four nights.

  “Ours is a small community,” Pleo heard her remind Cerussa on the morning the paper nightingales covered the street.

  “It’s microscopic,” replied Cerussa, pacing in front of the salt grinder to relieve the tedium of waiting.

  “Don’t you mean ‘claustrophobic’?” Pleo suggested as she stepped out of the bedroom they shared. She glimpsed the hollow-cheeked faces of her mother and twin sister as she walked past. The porthole window in the narrow hallway offered a better view of the paper river.

  “Gachala’s teeth and nails!” Cerussa shot back. “Stop projecting because you’re taller than me–”

  “Stop it, both of you! Will arguing speed up the news and bring back your father?” Guli thumped the grinding stone on the floor as her tone shifted from mother to harried mining supervisor.

  Chastened, Cerussa shut up and Pleo did the same. Their mother’s brand of discipline was to issue directives and statements like the boss she used to be, envisioning every worst contingency in order to prepare herself for them. However, a miner’s death never felt entirely final. Their names were included in various reports and therefore enshrined in administrative banality.

  Miners might die but were not normally born in a mine; Pleo and Cerussa were the exceptions in Blue Taro and Boxthorn, arriving during one of their mother’s 36-hour shifts. She’d stayed at her post in the on-site control room as labour pains had her doubled over.

  Pleo pushed open the porthole window. A solvent tang of ink and dye, long dried on paper, drifted in. The river’s impromptu beauty contrasted with the rows of container homes in the Blue Taro and Boxthorn New Areas. The smallest container homes were single boxes; interconnected stacks held larger families. The neighbourhoods were built around five threadbare parks, in clusters of seven homes facing each other over central courtyards. With instant guilt Pleo thought there ought to be more disasters if it took a crisis to jolt the residents into offsetting the ugliness.

  In a touch of mockery, the windows of the stacked homes were framed by staggered steel balconies that looked like mining shaft cages; Pleo was convinced it was deliberate. She and the other kids hated looking up at them so much they hurled rags soaked in paint to break up the balconies’ outlines. But no one ever bothered to throw paint or rags at the dingy windows of the Tanza home. Despite what had happened on Kerte Yurgi, this six-sided tin was still her home, a refuge of brewing tea, Cerussa’s pressed flower and leaf art, and manti dumplings made by the concessionaire. The gaps in the panes were plugged with strips of greased cloth and hammered sheet metal to keep out rain and drafts, but Guli had installed a new panelscreen in the cluttered kitchen, next to an extra freeze-drier unit. Pleo and her family had stopped living on surplus provisions from the mining commissaries since Idilman Tanza’s promotion to mine operations manager five years ago.

  Pleo and Cerussa were not allowed to use the good set of lounge furniture. It was carved from genuine Catru forest teak and therefore set aside for guests. The polished burgundy grain attested to a very comfortable existence once her father retired. His presence in the home was signified by cast-off heavy-duty boots stacked by the front door and teetering shelves of assorted rock carvings. According to him, it was stultifyingly boring between mining shifts.

  “No one’s there for the scenery,” he liked to joke on his occasional visits home. “Also, we’re bored because we aren’t machines. The job still requires the human touch. A robot can locate a hydrocarbon pocket but wouldn’t have the experience to know how deep to drill into it.”

  Space had long ceased to hold wonders for him and his miners. It was a cosmic junkyard filled with ore and hydrocarbon-rich rocks, but when you saw one asteroid you saw them all. The only real difference was which ones yielded rich yet finite pickings for Chatoyance Industrial and Mining.

  BY THE TIME a CIM company transport had rolled its way through Taro and Boxthorn, its ridged wheels were slicked with sodden paper nightingales. From the porthole window Pleo watched the boxy green vehicle stop outside her home and drop off two people like an urgent delivery: a tall woman, wearing a white uniform and the sky-blue veil of a psychiatric counsellor, accompanied Idilman Tanza to the front door.

  Slump-shouldered, he stumbled through the door, and her mother caught him just before he tripped. Pleo’s heart stopped at the sight of the visor covering his face.

  “Your father is still processing his experience,” the tall woman said through her veil, hanging back on the porch.

  “What’s wrong with his face?” asked Cerussa, and Pleo noted the strangled quality in her voice. She restrained her sister from following their parents to the master bedroom: Ma had taken it upon herself to guide Idilman over the threshold and hence back into normal life. She would refuse help from her daughters.

  “Nothing,” the woman said. “But his eyes are sensitive to light after being inside the mine for so long. Leave him be.”

  Her mother returned to the porch and asked the counselor inside to offer her some menthe tea. The woman shook her head and tightened her veil over her grey hair and face, not bothering to hide her disdain of the neighbourhood. Her immaculate tailoring made the street around her look rundown.

  “What happened to my father?” demanded Pleo, her mind racing in all directions. “And the other miners? Where are they now? Are they getting the same treatment too?”

  “I’m not at liberty to answer any questions for security reasons.”

  Pleo had stared after the counselor as she returned inside the CIM transport and lowered its gullwing doors. Was there movement behind those tinted windows, making the vehicle rock slightly? There had to be more Kerte Yurgi miners in the transport besides her father. It was a large vehicle and it was sure to make its rounds. The rest of the survivors were waiting inside and the counselor was safeguarding her patients’ confidentiality and privacy.

  But the CIM transport moved off the street and onto the main road connecting the gates of Taro and Boxthorn to the Lonely Heron Bridge. The company had only brought back her father.

  Before the transport slipped out of view Pleo ran after it in di
sbelief, as if its departure was a mistake. Breathless, she stopped in the middle of the street, treading on sodden paper nightingales while evading the stares of people standing on their porches.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GUNFIRE ECHOED DOWN the wide main corridor of the Polyteknical. To Pleo it always sounded like a target practice session gone awry, but the two ever-present Spinel Guards, resplendent in cardinal red armour, never left their posts outside the Multipurpose Hall. The Spinels were aware there was no danger; the sounds just signified the commencement of another intense training session.

  Yet their ready stances—slightly swaying, long legs planted shoulder-distance apart—suggested these Spinels were well aware of another risk. In spite of the noises, no guns or ballistics were involved, just the manifold sounds of heels striking the floor, enhanced by the acoustics of the hall. A pair of reinforced heels worn by Saurebaras Arodasi: Polyteknical’s resident and sole fla-tessen instructor. She feared nothing—you could afford to be fearless if you lived at her speed of life. To peer through the doors revealed nothing, until you saw a blur darting towards the metal fretwork screen behind the doors as Saurebaras delivered a single blow, forcing the heavy screen into your face. She did not tolerate interlopers and unauthorised bystanders. The Spinel guards protected them from Saurebaras, not the other way round.

  Most of the time, students gave the fla-tessen hall a wide berth, deliberately separating strenuous physical activity from the unwavering focus required of theory and lab work. However, Pleo’s intake had the first of their twice-a-week fla-tessen sessions this morning. Pleo trudged up the staircase, spiralling around a support column of malachite, leading to the fla-tessen hall and an open corridor overlooking one of the Gardens of Contemplation. She stopped halfway to touch her palm to the polished surface, a frozen storm of green and white swirls and concentric rings, and when she reached the top of the stairs she always traced the tips of her forceps over a cluster of crudely-patched holes, just below shoulder height on the column. Five perforations, now filled in with imitation malachite. The contrasting textures of the genuine and synthetic was engrossing to analyse.

  One of the Spinel guards raised a gloved hand at Pleo, warning her away from the doors. The guards appeared human as far as she could tell, but they definitely possessed some physical ameliorations; they stood watch for days on end.

  Pleo ignored the pre-sessional chatter and studied the murals outside the hall. The lustrous paintwork incorporated the oblique angles of the surrounding wall into the images. Recent touch-ups had imparted the whirling figures of dancers with an urgent vibrancy; if Pleo stared long enough, they would leap off the wall. The linear flow of images and accompanying placards gave Pleo a concise summary of fla-tessen’s origins. As a martial art, fla-tessen originated from “…cross-artistic exchanges of oral and abstract heritage during the settlement of Cabuchon and the Archer’s Ring.” This was the principle, but as for the reality, Pleo had her doubts. A footnote to one of the placards mentioned fla-tessen was developed by travelling dance troupes and based on various forms from Earth.

  Saurebaras was notably absent from the mural sections depicting the more recent history of fla-tessen, but the reason was an open secret and clearly no footnote. She had spearheaded fla-tessen’s revival, with more emphasis on developing it as a hybrid fighting style. She was rumoured to have consolidated her position by murdering seven other instructors and principal dancers during a demonstration gone awry three years ago. Constabulary had taken Saurebaras into custody and Chatoyance government subsequently sanctioned her. After a period of intensive subliminal reconditioning, she had been permitted to live out the remainder of her natural life in pedagogy. As the noise inside the hall abated, Pleo hoped Saurebaras’s reconditioning was still completely effective. She felt the cultural ministries of Chatoyance and Cabuchon could not afford to eliminate Saurebaras yet. To do so was to eradicate the art of fla-tessen, since she was its last living creator and proponent.

  Pleo also felt that in an ideal world, the Polyteknical curriculum would be immune to the interferences and idiosyncracies of policy makers and their Tiew Dweller associates.

  One of these associates was commemorated on the section of mural opposite the doors, a lone woman draped in stylised violet fla-tessen shawls which flowed down like a river to the painting’s foreground. The late Ignazia Madrugal, who invented the responsive fabric used to make the shawls. Now she held her hand out to the viewer as an invitation, as if to ask: “How will the future generations of the Archer’s Ring connect to their heritage without ensuring the existence of its artistic traditions?”

  Pleo didn’t think the absence of fla-tessen would make much difference as she observed her classmate Gia Aront, a dozen beginners and five high-intermediaries and adepts arrive for class. Making fla-tessen compulsory for Polyteknical students was another kind of lofty distraction.

  They waited near the doors, stretching out their bodies, flexing their arms and massaging their knees in preparation for class. Pleo spotted Gia watching the warm-up but not joining in. She was determined to not blend in like a normal student, and her presence resulted in a charged atmosphere of indulgence.

  Gia approached Pleo, holding out an opened lacquered case containing sticks of eyebrow paste and grip powder. Pleo shook her head as politely as possible. She didn’t need the paste, because she had no implants to protect. And she always brought her own powder.

  Just as Pleo expected, Gia snapped the case shut and tsked.

  “Nosebleed’s sister.” Exaggerated indignation made Gia’s voice loud yet brittle. “Admiring those murals won’t improve your fla-tessen skills.”

  Keeping quiet never stopped the taunting, but today was different—Gia had gone straight for the jugular and did not stop there.

  “Using your family’s name won’t improve your scores and test results.” Pleo also knew Gia’s many sore points and zeroed in on the most sensitive one. “No matter how many canals your father has built.”

  A shocked hush fell over Gia’s friends. This was too blatant, even for Pleo.

  “Mining scum! How dare you—?”

  “And what are you doing sharing the same oxygenwith mining scum like me, Gia Aront?” Pleo interrupted. “Did another overpriced finishing school in Signet Capital kick you out?”

  “None of your business!”

  “It’s all over the gutter highlights,” replied Pleo. “Next to a story about mismanagement at one of your father’s water treatment plants.”

  Gasps from Gia’s gang broke the prolonged hush. Now the other students drew away from both women, expecting a fight. Pleo was not worried; she could have floored Gia. She was pleased to notice that Gia was half a head shorter than her and petite like her mother, Matriarch Aront, whom the gossip highlights dubbed ‘The Gorgon.’ Both mother and daughter had the same bright yellow eyes.

  “Shut up, you ant!” Gia snapped. The word hung in the air between her and Pleo.

  Instead of anger, an odd relief came over Pleo. She had been waiting for Gia to call her that in front of everyone.

  “You picked that up from your parents? Do Tier-Dwellers still refer to us as ‘ants’ during their parties?”

  Pleo almost laughed. But the word was not only meant to sting, but as a threat. Gia could crush Pleo like an ant—and Pleo’s life mattered less than a mite living on the ant. Pleo’s neighbourhood was based around a central spine of repurposed administrative blocks at an Aront water treatment plant. Hence the functional ugliness of the neighbourhood, and also Gia’s attitude towards her: as if Pleo and the families of the Forty were squatting on her father’s land.

  And was it not earlier this term that some toadying Polyteknical instructor got worked over by a dozen Dogtooths, the personal guards of the Aronts? The incident allegedly happening in an underpass because he remarked to Gia that she was the mirror image of her mother.

  Gia held her fla-tessen fan in front of her face. With a flick of her wrist the weapon
unfurled with a soft rasp, revealing its leaf of intricate black lace covering ribs of gold-lacquered wood. Pleo instinctively backed away from its arresting beauty, brushing up against the mural behind her, next to Ignazia Madrugal’s outstretched hand. Fla-tessen fans appeared to be made with lace and wood, but the “lace” was actually layers of living membrane grownover a mesh of threads finer than silk. Modified stinging cells, harvested from offworld coral farms.

  “You’re only a tentative candidate for Adept. Threaten me and you’ll be off the longlist before Shineshift,” Pleo warned.

  “Threaten you? With a training fan?” Gia smirked and stepped closer to Pleo. “There’s no blade, and the venom will only give you bad rash. Once they award me with a real fan, I won’t hear another word out of you, right?”

  Pleo extended her index and middle finger forceps and used them to parry aside Gia’s fan. The tips of her forceps tingled as they came into contact with the mild venom, and she drew back her arm.

  “One little tragedy and thirty-nine families are entitled to special treatment forever,” continued Gia.

  “Forty miners!” Pleo shot back.

  “Apologies, I forgot one survived. Luckily the salvage teams found your father in time. So let’s imagine if all Chatoyants were handed a free pass due to some tragic occupational event. This time it’s forty, then comes another incident—300, and after that, 3000 more?” Gia gestured to the rest of the students. “Soon enough, Polyteknical classrooms, and even the Tiers themselves, would be overwhelmed with the children of other miners, war veterans and long-haul pilots—”

  A sudden bang interrupted Gia’s grandstanding. The doors of the hall flew wide open, framing the figure of Saurebaras, and Pleo marveled at her strength. Saurebaras flicked her arm up in a gesture of exasperation and hurled something small at Gia and Pleo.