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  I held his gaze for a long moment, then stood and walked back toward the stairs. The Whale shifted on the water, and my shadow shuddered across the wall. I reached the first of the dark, creaky steps before Xiaohao called out to me.

  "The password," he said, his voice tight. "It's garden."

  I spent most of the morning in Little Wuxie. Their accumulator was down, and their Administrators were frantic. All five of the gray, yammering men wanted to peer over my shoulder as I checked out the battery, the tanks, the pipes. Their anxiety was as exhausting as it was unnecessary. One accumulator wouldn't make or break the city's weather control. Finally I asked them to leave, told them that their "ambient body heat" might damage the components.

  They left me alone.

  Slowly, carefully, I extracted the tower's guts. The morning was hot, and I was thankful for the sea breeze that played around me. Many of the central wires had started to rust. Not so badly that the whole accumulator should break down, but it would become more of a problem as time wore on. I'd seen the same thing in some of the other towers; these were old machines.

  I wiped the sweat from my face with my forearm, watched the gulls wheel above. The birds were probably waiting for me to leave. They liked to perch on the seaside accumulators and watch the water. The upper halves of the machines' black metal hulls were always spattered with white.

  Maybe, I thought. Just maybe.

  I hauled out the battery cradle, inspected it from every side. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, with the steadiest hands I could summon, I pulled the battery out of the cradle, and there was the culprit. A layer of birdshit covered the receptor prongs. Either one gull had eaten a catastrophically disagreeable meal, or the entire flock regularly squirted their lunches with vicious precision. I cleaned up the receptor, tucked the various wires back into their racks, and shoved the cradle back into the tower. The accumulator's black skin began to thrum at once.

  The Wuxie Administrators were overjoyed. Embarrassingly so. They thrust iced jackfish and rice wine into my hands: overwrought thanks that Little Wuxie could hardly afford. As much as they plainly appreciated my help, I doubted this was the standard engineer's honorarium; these men knew my father's name. I thanked each in turn, accepted the gifts graciously, and made to leave at the earliest opportunity. But the Senior Administrator, a fox-faced man named Hu, raised his hand to stop me.

  "One more token of our thanks," he said, and produced a small, foldable wi-mo from his pocket. No more than two or three years old by the look of it; the surface was only gently scratched, and the solar cells seemed to work. Hu powered up the device as tenderly as one might wake a baby. "We've recently had a trader from Chengdu," he said. "I give you this on behalf of all Wuxie."

  I unconsciously tongued the month-old unit in the roof of my mouth. It broadcasted at terabytes-per-second to the contacts in my eyes, responded to minute tongue gestures and subvocalized commands. Yunhe had also had the trader from Chengdu. Papa commanded reverence even from outsiders.

  "Thank you," I said, and accepted the wi-mo.

  The walk back to Little Yunhe was long and hot and awkward. Foolishly, I took the boardwalk, which bustled with fishermen and hungry dockside homeless. Most either knew my name or felt no compulsion to harass me, but more than one boathand trailed his leer with a whistle, or reached out to smack my ass. Jokes and arguments played out around me in a dozen tongues: Korean, Filipino, Mongolian, Thai. Some of the jokes were opaque to me. Others were all too understandable.

  The eyes of the homeless flicked up from their decade-old, gray market wi-mos to follow the bundle of treasures in my arms. My cheeks flushed, and the sun bore down, and finally I couldn't bear the stares; I put down the jackfish and walked swiftly away. Papa would be angry if he learned that I'd given away honoraria, but I kept the rice wine and the wi-mo, so he would likely never know--unless the Little Wuxie Administrators asked whether he enjoyed the fish.

  I pulled the wi-mo out of my pocket, unfolded it. The translucent sheet overlaid the walk before me with a few simple icons and live feeds: clock, calendar, local temperature. My roof-of-the-mouth unit noticed the new machine and prompted me to link the devices for file transfer and load-share. I declined. I'd gotten the same prompt at home every morning for the past week. There was a new computer somewhere in the flat, one my father didn't want to talk about.

  The password, I thought. It's garden.

  He came to us with promises of dirt. I was outside of the city that day, checking up on the outermost ring of accumulators, but I saw the whole mess on the network once it was over. I saw it from every angle, through the beady eyes of two dozen different wi-mo cameras. On some impulse that I didn't quite understand, I brought up the most popular video now.

  Xiaohao strode into Little Yunhe Square, right up to the Administrators' Quonset hut offices. He wore the black skinweave favored by the Ecclesia--likely the first of his many mistakes--and waved his arms like an attention-starved child. "It's time to return to our ancestral home!" he shouted. Xiao had never been a very good public speaker; he compensated for anxiety with breathtaking pompousness. "The day is today! The hour is this hour! Follow me, and we'll raise Yunhe from new soil!"

  With each word, more and more of the square's homeless raised their wi-mos to record the madman's performance. Two security officers outside of the Quonset hut exchanged uncertain glances and advanced cautiously, hands on the butts of their pistols.

  "New soil!" Xiaohao cried again. "Smart soil from the Ecclesia, soil to reclaim Yunhe--the real Yunhe--from the ash. I'm giving this to you. We will built it together. Look! Explore!" That last bit made no sense; did he carry some of the magic dirt in his hand? Xiao went silent as something approached from offscreen. The camera jerked to one side, zoomed in on the Little Yunhe Administrators as they emerged from their offices. Papa, dressed in his trademark gray suit, took the lead.

  "Father," said Xiao, barely audible now, "I've brought--"

  Papa moved faster than the wi-mo filmmaker could follow. When the camera found him again, the old man stood over his son, who was crumpled on the ground clutching his face. "I'm giving this to you," screamed Xiao, and Papa reared back to kick him in the gut.

  I couldn't watch any further.

  My fingers shook as I folded up the wi-mo. Could I really say that Papa wouldn't kill him? I'd winced when I saw the video for the first time, but assumed the worst was over. After all, Xiaohao hadn't been the first criminal beaten by our father, and Little Yunhe had never executed anyone before. My brother had come here practically wrapped in the flag of Ecclesia; of course Papa would show him hard justice, give him a week or two in the Whale. But he wouldn't kill his own son.

  Would he?

  I tried to call Papa, got no response. Then I began to jog. Xiao's words played over and over again in my head: are you sure? I think they might put me on a pike. I cut through the Little Jingjiang Tent Quarter, which was quiet except for a handful of eateries. The smell of fried onion wafted from solar woks--I should have been hungry, but the thought of food made me nauseous.

  The route through the Tent Quarter was shorter, but Jingjiang had suffered a milder disaster than Yunhe, and its detritus was stacked outside of every tent. Bookshelves, defunct televisions, stainless steel cages. Coffee makers, lamps, the stems of wineglasses. Leftovers of another dead town, clogging the veins of the refugee city. Twice I had to leap over fallen stacks of boxes, and once I nearly toppled an old woman selling reusable cigarettes.

  Finally, the ways widened and the tents thinned. A squad of security officers in old, weathered hardsuits stood along the border of Yunhe Tent Quarter; they tensed as I approached and then relaxed when they saw my face. The squad leader nodded his respect.

  Papa might have been in the Administrators' offices or he might have been in bed. Both huts were inland, but home was closer. I glanced across the water at the Whale and picked up my pace, drawing a dozen confused gazes in my wake as I jogged toward our house on the
hill.

  The door was locked. I groped for my keys, shoved the door open, and stumbled inside, where a dozen rattling fans twisted around to cool me. The lights were off, and the doors between each partition were open. In the study, Papa's favorite dishes lay dirty on his desk, and a yellowed novel sat half-open on his seat. I was certain now that he wasn't home, but I called out his name nonetheless: an impropriety that would have earned me a lecture in the best of times.

  There was no response.

  I hissed a curse and made to leave, then stopped short. The smart-fans squeaked, surprised by my sudden stillness. On my eyelid, the prompt flashed: Link to device "XiXi" for data transfer? The same prompt I'd gotten every day for the past week. I wasn't sure where Papa had hidden Xiaohao's wi-mo, but that didn't matter, did it? I was in range. I agreed to link, and Xiao's unit asked me for a password.

  "Garden," I said. The world changed.

  I had only fleeting memories of my grandfather's garden, but those scraps were vivid. Sunflowers like bright, tremendous trees, the space beneath their canopy a secret yellow sanctuary. I squatted in the soil with my worn, creaky kitty until Xiao, a few years older, fell onto me in a spray of dirt and battle cries. He whipped the stalks of the great golden flowers with some uprooted weed, sent me wailing out of the garden to the farm proper. I got lost in endless rows of sorghum, and when I found Papa at last, he nearly beat me for running out of sight.

  Now I stood in the garden again. Sunflowers towered over my head, five or six meters tall, brighter than ever, brighter even than the flowers of memory. Birds chirped somewhere just out of sight. Up the hill, between the stalks, I could see my grandfather's house, intact and even renovated.

  Yunhe. The real Yunhe, back from the dead.

  This can't be fake, I thought. Sims always left me with this jarring sense of absolute credulity. The wi-mo fed me my home through the roof of my mouth, and I couldn't help but believe it. This can't be fake, I thought, though I knew that it was. I can smell the dirt.

  I made my way out of the canopy of monster flowers and gasped. "Oh, Xiao," I murmured, and struggled to remind myself that nothing here was real or meaningful, that my home was still buried beneath the black flood. Grandfather's house was beautiful, and larger than it had ever been in real life: a multi-wing, three-story complex with something like an observation deck on the roof. I followed a stone path--flanked by more traditionally proportioned blue roses--from the garden to the house. The front door was unlocked, and I stepped inside.

  It wasn't the home I remembered. Somehow it was more than home, the idea of grandfather's place writ large. There was space for dozens in the dining room, seats arrayed around three beautiful wooden tables. On the ground floor alone there were two kitchens, a full bar, and a game room. Xiao had connected a library to grandfather's study; Papa's favorite painting of the War Above held a position of honor over the reading couch. The house's additional stories were given over to bedrooms, enough to sleep our entire extended family and several more families besides.

  It's a dormitory, I realized. Grandfather's house transformed into a dormitory. Was this how citizens of Ecclesia lived? Like wealthy college students?

  I took the elevator--the elevator--to the roof. Lawn chairs encircled a small herb garden, and at each edge of the roof, telescopes gazed off into the distance. The day was preternaturally clear: no smog, no fog, and not a single cloud in the sky. I could make out individual trees on the blue mountains that towered around Yunhe. If I'd wanted, I probably could have found the mountaintop waste lake that had laid my town to waste.

  Instead, I looked out across the Yunhe that Xiaohao had made. His model world. As far as I could tell, there were no traditional homes here; in their place were half a dozen more dormitory houses, each surrounded by vast tracts of vibrant farmland. Here and there in the fields stood enormous, gleaming towers: new model accumulators hybridized with wind turbines. To the south, at a point roughly equidistant from each of the dormitories, I saw Xiao's vision of a town square. Open air market, playground and pool, small restaurants, even an amphitheater. Everything was linked by a web of red brick paths. It was lovely. The gardens, the farms--everything was lovely.

  I shut down the sim.

  Yunhe disappeared, and I smelled the ocean again. Smartfans surrounded me in an eager semicircle, cooled me with a kind of mad mechanical enthusiasm. Ships' horns sounded in the distance. I took three swift, deep breaths--a trick I'd learned in college for exiting sims as quickly as possible--and ran out the door. Somehow it was easier to believe in the real world with a full pair of lungs.

  The security officers outside of the Administrators' offices were less genial than the ones on the border. They surely knew my face, but still they held their position in front of the door, and they neither smiled nor nodded. There was even a little smirking twist in the corner of the squad leader's mouth--my panic must have leaked out of my eyes, visible to everyone.

  "State your business," said the squad leader, plaintive and automatic. He was short, broad-shouldered, and wore a few days' stubble. I briefly wondered if I could force my way past him, gave up on the idea as quickly as I'd conjured it. Dozens of people decided that they had business with the Administrators every day: accusations of chicken theft or wi-mo hacking, petitions for divorce or consolidation of tent-space. This man's entire job was to stand in the way of desperate people's grievances.

  "I need to see my father," I said.

  "Do you have an appointment?"

  "He called me. Asked me to come as quickly as possible."

  "You won't mind if I confirm that," he said.

  I smiled sweetly and said that I wouldn't mind at all. I had an understanding with Jung, my father's secretary. The squad leader unfolded his wi-mo, carried on an extremely short subvocalized conversation with an invisible party, and then frowned.

  "Go on, then," he muttered.

  I stepped inside the Quonset hut. The place was sweltering. Two parallel rows of secretaries glanced up from paper-plastered desks, every sweaty face transparently terrified that I had come to make more work. I found Papa in the back of the hut, softly berating Jung over something to do with ledgers. Jung looked relieved to see me.

  "Papa," I said, "may I speak to you in private?"

  He raised an eyebrow but nodded, beckoned me to his office and closed the door. We sat on either side of his desk, and my eye flicked to the painting behind his head: a battle scene from the War Above. Murmured arguments about fishing zones floated from the office next door; the partitions between offices were more of an affectation than a proof against sound. I spoke quietly.

  "When will Xiao go free? He looks awful."

  Papa sat back and sighed. "Yuen. It's not clear that he will ever go free."

  He didn't blink as he said it. His eyes were always wide and wary and unblinking, as if he'd never stopped looking down on the entire world at once, never given up the divine-eye view from space. He ran one hand across his gray-black beard, which had only recently started to fill in. "You know we can't look the other way on this, sweet. We'd countenance sedition and burn every scrap of our credibility all in one clean sweep. Xiao made his choices, and he's left us with none."

  Goosebumps raised across my neck. "So," I said, barely a whisper, "you're going to kill him?"

  Papa was silent. His face was utterly still, and he didn't blink.

  "I want to show you something," I said, newly careful with every syllable. I didn't know how precarious a line I was walking anymore, and I couldn't be sure that Papa wouldn't throw me in the Whale for collaboration. But I also couldn't let my brother die. I queued up the sim, prepared to send--

  "If it's Xiaohao's new Yunhe," said Papa, "I've seen it and don't want to see it again."

  I froze. "You've seen--"

  "He sent it to all of the Administrators the day he came back."

  "And you saw," I said. I felt clenched and cold.

  "I saw enough."

  "You saw th
e garden. You saw the painting in the library."

  Again, Papa was hard-eyed and silent and absolutely still. And I finally understood. I'd thought that he was furious with Xiao, disappointed and sore with wounded pride. But incredibly, terrifyingly, this wasn't a matter of emotion. It wasn't personal at all.

  Papa was unwilling to make it personal.

  He'd never been particularly traditional. He might have forgiven Xiao for simply running away with a professor. Even if the professor in question was male and Filipino and given to lectures on crowdsourcing microprotest. Xiao's romances were a family matter. But he had fled to a metanation, and that made his choices the business of the state. That was defection. Dereliction, sedition.

  Papa couldn't forgive sedition.

  "His world means nothing," he said softly. "It's fantasy. That's all."

  "I think Xiao believes he can make it real."

  "Your brother believes a lot of stupid things." He stood with a grunt, finally turned his wide eyes away from me. "You have a gentle heart, and I admire that, but today we can't be gentle. I trust you're smart enough not to be moved by other people's stupidities."

  I struggled to make my face as opaque as his own. "Yes, Papa," I said. My intentions must have leaked out of my eyes. I stood and opened the partition door, but Papa stopped me.

  "One more thing, sweet." He gripped my shoulder. "You mustn't give away your honoraria. Word travels, and it makes us appear ungrateful. Arrogant. We can't afford that kind of reputation at the moment. Do you understand?" He smiled his disarming smile.

  "Yes," I said. I understood.

  I flipped on my arc knife. The blade hissed and lit up the creaking, deathtrap stairway of the Whale, cast my skin in electric blue. I jumped past the the last two steps, and my landing echoed in rattling metal. There was no time for caution. It was time for knives.