Yalda brushed the complication aside; she was having enough trouble trying to make the exponential blow-up in the light equation go away. She was scheduled to deliver a summary of her theory to the school of natural sciences in less than two stints, but if she couldn’t offer Giorgio a plausible solution to the flaw he’d uncovered, he’d cancel the talk.
When they entered the apartment, Antonia was seated on the floor with dye and paper beside her. A firestone lamp was sputtering on the shelf above, casting a forlorn shadow. She’d probably been composing another letter to Antonio, but when Yalda and Tullia approached to greet her, her skin was blank. Yalda wished she could have offered her advice or comfort, but what did a solo have to say about the choices she faced?
“How was the magic show?” Antonia asked, forcedly cheerful.
“Upstaged,” Tullia replied. She described the celestial mirror trick that had followed.
“I heard some commotion from the street,” Antonia said. “I looked out the window, but it must have been over by then.”
“Do you mind if we use the dye?” Yalda asked. She wanted to have the report on the Hurtler completed as soon as possible, ready for the couriers who’d be leaving at dawn.
“Of course not.” Antonia put the lid back on the pot and slid it toward her. “I was still gathering my thoughts; it can wait until morning.”
Yalda saw the curtain part at the entrance to the apartment. As she spun around to face the intruders one of them screamed, “Lie on the floor! All of you!” By now, four men had filed into the room, and there were more behind them. They wore police belts, and they’d unsheathed their knives.
Antonia began wailing. “I’m sorry! Tullia, I’m sorry! Someone must have—”
Tullia said, “Be quiet, you don’t know—” One of the officers stepped up to her, knife outstretched.
“Lie down, or I’ll split you open!”
Tullia knelt then lay on her chest. Yalda met her rear gaze, hoping for advice, but if there was a message she couldn’t read it.
Yalda said, “Antonia, get behind me.” She moved toward the officer who’d threatened Tullia. He was tiny; if not for the knife she could have done what she liked with him. “You want to go out the window?” she taunted him. “You’ve got no business here. Go harass someone else.”
The man raised the knife confidently, no doubt accustomed to its power to induce obedience. Yalda advanced on him, undeterred. She wouldn’t even need to extrude extra limbs for the encounter; if she seized him with both hands it wouldn’t matter if she lost an arm in the process, she could still fling him down to the street with the remaining one.
“Please, Yalda, don’t!” Antonia implored her, distraught. “I’ll go back! Don’t make trouble for yourself!”
Yalda was unmoved; what gave these buffoons the right to interfere in anyone’s life? If one of them spilled his brains on the cobblestones, the others might rethink their priorities.
Tullia addressed her calmly. “Yalda, if you resist, we’ll all get a beating. If you harm even one of them, we’ll all be killed.”
Yalda stared at the man in front of her, then forced herself to look past his triumphant sneer to the long line of colleagues waiting behind him, knives at the ready. She might be able to deal with three or four of them before she was overpowered—but if Tullia was right, it would not be worth the price.
She knelt down, then lay on the floor, subduing her rage. Her physical strength meant nothing. The rightness of her cause meant nothing. The Council had given these men the authority to capture and return runaways; Antonia’s plans for her life were irrelevant.
The officer she’d confronted put a foot on her back and held her arms behind her while someone passed him a length of hardstone chain. He slipped the loop at the end of the chain around one of her arms, then took a vial from his belt and shook a few beads of bright red resin onto her palm. It stung fiercely, but Yalda forced herself not to lash out. Then he pressed both of her palms together. Skin stuck tightly to skin, in itself no great hardship, but the resin made her body act as if these ordinary surfaces comprised a kind of internal partition, a pathological mistake that needed to be broken down.
Yalda closed her eyes for a moment, fighting not to lose consciousness. She had no right to be surprised by any of this; how many prisoners had she seen shuffling through Zeugma with their arms melded? She’d looked away, like everyone else. Murderers and thieves got what they deserved.
The officer ran the tip of his knife over her skin methodically, until he found the telltale crease of a pocket.
“Do you want me to cut it open?” he asked.
Yalda opened the pocket. He reached in and took out a handful of coins and her vial of holin.
In the corner of the room, Antonia was pleading with her own captor. Her hands had been bound with rope, but she and Tullia had been spared the melding resin, no doubt as a reward for their swift compliance. Once they were down on the street, Yalda thought, Antonia could easily slip out of those unreliable bonds and make a run for it.
Yalda’s tormentor walked over to Antonia. “You’re a runaway?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re willing to return to your co?”
“Yes, sir. But my friends didn’t know; I told them he was dead. I’ll go back to him willingly, but you have to release them.”
This attempt at a bargain amused the officer. “This patrol wasn’t looking for you,” he said, “but it’s kind of you to volunteer the truth. We only came here for the fat one, the solo. She assaulted a Councilor’s son.”
He walked back to Yalda and began kicking her in the tympanum.
The room fractured, the walls collapsed into rubble. Yalda writhed and screamed, buried in shards of noise and pain.
8
“When you come before the sergeant,” Tullia whispered, “don’t argue about anything. Agree to the fine, agree to the conditions, and you’ll be out of here in a few more days.”
Yalda was bound to the wall of her cell, her own flesh the last link in the chain. She’d threaded her body through the loop of her melded arms so they were in front of her now, a minor improvement. The cell was bare and windowless, equally dark by night and by day. Twice, someone had entered unseen; the first time to beat her, the second to strew rotten grain on the floor. The loudest sounds that reached her were the thwack of wood against flesh and the hums of misery from other cells.
They’d granted her two unintended mercies, though. The floor was real soil, her favorite kind of bed; the worms that might have revolted a more fastidious guest just made her feel at home. And they’d put her next to Tullia, allowing them to whisper to each other through the wall’s porous stone. Without that, she would have lost her mind.
“I’ll be charged with sheltering a runaway, and for the holin in my room if they found it,” Tullia explained. Apparently she’d been through all of this before. “They’ll fine me a few dozen pieces, and make me swear an oath not to repeat my crimes. Your fine will probably be larger, but don’t worry: they’ll give you a chance to contact people who can help you pay it. I expect I’ll be out before you, so I’ll talk to Daria and the others at the Solo. Whatever you need, we’ll raise it.”
“He threw the stone at me!” Yalda complained. “Don’t pay them anything! Let them charge that shit-head with assault as well.”
“Can you produce a dozen witnesses against him?” Tullia asked.
“Probably not.”
“Then it doesn’t matter what he did. Stop telling yourself that it matters, or you’re going to make everything harder.”
Yalda could not accept this advice. She knew she should have restrained herself: she should have resisted lobbing back the cobblestone, sharp and heavy as she’d known it to be. But she still ached to see her assailant locked up beside her, beaten beside her, fined and humiliated and forced to promise to reform his own violent ways.
She knew that her actions had cost Antonia her life. Maybe a few years of it, maybe a few stints, but Antonia’s chance to bargain with her co had been lost the instant Yalda had brought the police into Tullia’s apartment. That was the worst of what she’d done, and she’d willingly confess her recklessness to anyone accusing her on Antonia’s behalf. But her own culpability excused no one else. Let Antonio, who was merely eager for children, let the Councilor’s son, who was only teasing a solo, let the police, who were simply doing their jobs, all line up and take their punishment beside her.
Otherwise, octofurcate them all.
Tullia grew weary of the subject, and after making her advice clear she steered their conversation elsewhere.
“Come out of this stinking prison with me for a couple of bells,” she begged Yalda. “Why live the life of the mind at all, if you’re not going to live it now?”
“I’ll lie here and hallucinate Hurtlers, shall I? That will be a real comfort.”
“Last time I checked, you had a more urgent problem,” Tullia reminded her.
“You want us to solve the exponential blow-up, here?”