City of Stairs

DEAD LANGUAGES

The tiny graphite strokes blend together in the light of the lamps. Shara tsks, lights another lamp, sets it at her desk, and tries to read again. Damn this city, she thinks. How backward must they be that our own embassy can’t get enough gas to light a room?

She’s transcribed the professor’s code on a number of papers, trying to render truth from the twisted characters like squeezing water from a stone. A cup of noonyan tea cools beside the documents. (Shara has decided to ease up on the sirlang: if she keeps going at this rate, she’ll exhaust the embassy’s stores in a week.) She bends so close to the documents that the heat from the lamps is insufferable.

It is an address, she thinks. She can tell just by how the characters are arranged. She has broken a bit of the code already, but she suspects it is not really a code in any conventional sense: rather, the message has been translated into a mash-up of foreign alphabets. What she believes to be the consonants all have the top half of Gheshati, a dead alphabet from Western Saypur. And though it took her hours to figure out, the bottom halves, she thinks, are all in Chotokan, an incredibly rare and borderline impenetrable language from the mountains east of the Dreyling Republics.

Now she just has to figure out the vowels.

And then the numbers.

Oh, the numbers …

Her admiration for the professor has dimmed, somewhat: Pangyui, you cryptic old lizard.…

She tosses back tea and sits back in her chair. She tries to believe that this is taking her so long because the code itself is difficult. She does not want to entertain the notion that she might, in truth, be deeply distracted.

He’s here. He’s here in the city, with me. Maybe blocks away. Why didn’t I consider this? How could I have been so stupid?

It had started, like so many of Shara’s lifelong pursuits, with a game.

The first days of any term at Fadhuri Academy in Ghaladesh were always the tensest. The bright young stars of every county and island in Saypur found themselves crowded together into Fadhuri’s hallowed halls and quickly discovered that, despite everything their upbringings had told them, they might not actually be special: every student here was a genius back at home, so every student arrived wondering if they would prove to be exceptional among the truly exceptional.

As a way to relieve the tension, the school tradition was to hold a Batlan tournament on the weekend before term really started. It became such a popular event that parents encouraged their children to drown themselves in strategies and plays before arriving, perhaps assuming, erroneously, that a high place in the tournament would ensure better grades and a brighter future.

Shara Komayd, then sixteen, was no such student. Not only was she unshakably confident that she was the most brilliant child on the grounds, but she had always held Batlan in some contempt, thinking it a showy game where chance was far too much of a factor: the roll of the dice at each turn determined each player’s capabilities, and it did make the game more spontaneous, but it removed a lot of the players’ control. She had always preferred Tovos Va, a somewhat similar game that was far more cerebral and much more slow-paced, rewarding players that thought several plays ahead. However, she rarely got the chance to play it: Tovos Va was a Continental game, and was unheard of in Saypur.

But the lessons she’d learned in Tovos Va did translate to Batlan, to an extent—though to mitigate the factor of chance, you had to plan very, very far ahead. If you did so early enough, and played with enough foresight, decimating any normal Batlan player was child’s play.

On that first weekend before term, Shara tore through the Batlan rankings like a shark. She did not win: she annihilated the other players. Since she essentially won the games in the first dozen plays, and had to play out the next three dozen before taking the board, she found herself increasingly contemptuous of the other players, flailing in her traps as they thought they were playing one game when in truth they were playing another. And she let her contempt show: she sighed, rolled her eyes, sat with her chin in her hand, and groaned as her opponents made one blind, stupid move after the other.

The other students began to watch her with naked hate. When they discovered she was sixteen, two years younger than any normal Fadhuri freshman, the hate curdled to rage.

Shara became so sure that she’d utterly sweep the tournament that she barely paid attention to the standings. When she finally glanced at them, she saw another player was accomplishing nearly the same feat she was, eating through the players from the other side of the hall: VOTROV.

She leaned back in her chair and scanned the room to get a look at him. It did not take long for her to find him.

He was, to her surprise, not a Saypuri at all, but a Continental: a tall, thin, pale young man with blond-red hair, a strong jaw, and bright blue eyes.

“I’ve made my play,” said Shara’s opponent.

“Shh,” said Shara, who wished to watch this boy more.

“What?” her opponent said, incensed.

“Oh, fine,” said Shara, and she made two plays that would probably destroy him in the next round. Then she returned to looking at the Continental.

It was not uncommon for rich Continentals to send their children to Saypur for education. Saypur, after all, was now the wealthiest nation in the world, and the Continent was still quite dangerous. The boy certainly had an aristocratic look about him: he slouched in his chair with an air of bored pleasure, and he talked to his opponents constantly, merrily gibing them as though at a coffeehouse.

The boy looked up and saw Shara watching. He grinned and winked.

Disconcerted, Shara returned to her game.

Finally, after two hours of play, and after laying waste to half the students at Fadhuri, Shara found herself sitting down opposite the Continental. They were the only two players left; the rest of the school and faculty stood around them, watching.

Shara stared mistrustfully at the Continental boy, who sat with a cocksure grin, stretched his back, popped his knuckles, and said, “I’m quite looking forward to my first actual game, aren’t you?” He started laying out his Batlan pieces.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Shara as she did the same.

“Mm. Maybe,” he said. “Tell me. Have you ever heard of Tovos Va?”

Something inside of Shara squeaked. She hesitated very slightly before laying out the next piece.

“It’s very popular where I’m from,” said the boy brightly. “Why, back in Bulikov, we had a yearly tournament. Now, which ones did I win? There were three tournaments I won in a row. I just can’t quite remember which ones.…”

Shara finished laying out her pieces. “I suggest, sir,” she said, “that you play, rather than talk.”

He looked at her arrangements and laughed. “So nice to see my suspicions were right! That looks a little like Mischeni’s Feint,” he said. “Or it would be, if this was Tovos Va. Good thing this is Batlan, eh?” He finished laying out his own pieces.

Shara glanced at them. “And that,” she said, “is Strovsky’s Curl.”

He grinned triumphantly.

“Or you would like me to think it is,” said Shara, “though I suspect in three plays it will be a Vanguard Block, and after that, a basic flank.”

The boy blinked as if he’d been slapped. His grin vanished.

“But good thing this is Batlan, eh?” said Shara savagely. She leaned in. “You look so much prettier,” she said, “with your face wiped clean of smugness.”

The students around them oooooohed.

The boy stared at her. He laughed once, in disbelief. Then: “Roll the dice.”

“Gladly,” said Shara.

She dropped the ivories, and the game began.

It was to be a four-hour slugfest: a game of endless beginnings, of defensive positions, of recombinations and rearrangements. It was, one teacher said, the most conservative game of Batlan he had ever seen played: but, of course, they were not really playing Batlan at all, but a different game altogether, a mix of Batlan and Tovos Va they were inventing as they fought.

He talked to her constantly, a ceaseless burble of chatter. For three hours Shara resisted, ignoring his gibes, but finally the Continental boy asked, “Tell me—is your life so devoid of entertainment that you have enough time to study obscure, foreign games?” He made a play that appeared aggressive but that Shara knew was a feint. “Have you no friends? No family?”

“You assume your game is difficult to learn,” said Shara, nettled. “To me, your game and your culture are childish frippery.” She ignored his feint and pressed toward a front in a manner that would look suicidal to anyone who didn’t know what was going on.

He laughed. “It talks! The little battle-ax talks!”

“I am sure that to someone of your position, anyone who doesn’t tolerate each of your whims with blind submission must seem positively inconceivable.”

“Perhaps so. Perhaps I’ve traveled solely to find backtalk somewhere. But I wonder—what could have beaten you so badly that it’s honed such a sharp edge, my little battle-ax?” He swooped back around, redoubled his defenses. (Some student nearby grumbled, “When are they actually going to start playing?”)

“You are mistaken, sir,” said Shara. “You are merely sensitive. In fact, I would expect that to sit upon an uncushioned chair would surely score your princely buttocks.”

While the students laughed, Shara began to quietly construct a trap.

The Continental boy did not appear insulted; rather, there was an odd gleam in his eye. “Oh, my dear,” he said. “If you really wished to check, I’d not stop you.” He made a play.

“What does that mean?” asked Shara. She made another play, appearing to withdraw inward, while in truth layering her trap.

“Don’t claim to be so innocent,” he said. “You brought the subject up, my dear. I am simply yielding to you.” He made another play, blindly.

“You don’t seem to be yielding,” said Shara. She withdrew farther, adding bait, thinking, Why is he suddenly playing so poorly?

“Appearances,” said the boy, “can be deceiving.” He rolled the dice, thrust out again.

“True,” said Shara. “So. Do you want to end it now?”

“To end what now?”

“The game. We can just walk away now, if you like.”

“What, as a draw?”

“No,” said Shara. “I just won. It’ll take a few plays for it to happen, but. Well. I did.”

The other students glanced at one another, perplexed.

The Continental boy sat forward, looked at her pieces, and reviewed the last few plays: evidently, he’d not been paying attention. Shara realized he hadn’t looked at the board at all in the last plays, but only at her.

The boy’s mouth fell open. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. I see.”

“Yes,” said Shara.

“Hm. Well. No, no. Let’s do the honorable thing and play it out, shall we?”

It was a formality, one extended by a few lucky rolls of the dice, but soon Shara was picking his pieces off the board. Yet to her irritation, the boy didn’t seem shamed or abashed: he just kept smiling at her.

She made what she knew to be the second-to-last play. “I must ask—how does it feel to be beaten by a Saypuri girl?”

“You,” he said as he laid his game’s neck below her blade, “are not a girl.”

She faltered as she made her play—what could he mean by that?

Shara picked off his final piece. The students around them erupted in a cheer, but she barely heard them. Another of his mind games. “Before you ask, I’ll play you again anytime.”

“Well, honestly,” he said cheerfully, “I’d much prefer a fuck.”

She stared at him, astonished.

He winked, stood up, and walked away to be joined by his friends. She watched him go, then gazed around at the cheering students.

Had anyone else heard that? Had he actually meant that? Could he really?

“Who was that?” she asked aloud.

“Do you really not know?” said a student.

“No.”

“Really? You really didn’t know you were playing Vohannes Votrov, the richest prick on the whole of the damnable Continent?”

Shara stared at the empty board and wondered if the boy had been playing yet another, different game all along: neither Batlan nor Tovos Va, but a game with which she was totally unfamiliar.

The numbers are going to shave years off of Shara’s life.

She has translated much of the professor’s code. It now reads: _ _ _ _ H _ GH ST _ _ _ T, SA _ NT M _ _ _ V _ _ VA BANK, B _ X _ _ _ _, GH _ V _ NY TA _ _ _ KAN _ _ _ _ _ _.

A security box, in a bank. A bank that bears the name of some saint. Ordinarily this would narrow her choices down quite a bit, but High Street is a very long street in Bulikov, and nearly every bank is named after a saint of some sort.

Actually, Shara knows almost everything on the Continent is named after some saint or another. Saypuri historians gauge there were an estimated 70,000 saints before the Great War: apparently the Divinities considered granting sainthood an irritating formality to be signed off on without thought. When the WR were enacted, the idea of trying to remove sainted names from polis structures—as well as attempting to completely rename entire cities and regions, each named after some Divinity or Divine creature—proved overwhelming, and in what was considered to be a very big concession, and a very big shrug, Saypur simply gave up trying. Shara wishes they hadn’t. It would make her job much easier now.

Names, she thinks. Names are always such a problem. After all, the South Seas are actually northeast of Saypur—they’re only called such because it was the Continent that named them first, and any name, as Saypur has learned over and over again, dies hard and slowly.

And the numbers … Shara has not gotten to them yet, but she has glanced at them. Numerals and digits of any kind are always incredibly difficult in ancient languages: one particularly fervent cult of the Divinity Jukov refused to acknowledge the number 17, for example, though no historian has been able to figure out why.

She remembers a conversation she had with Dr. Pangyui in their safe house in Ahanashtan:

“The amount of dead languages,” he said, “are like the stars.”

“That many?” she asked.

“The ancient Continentals were not stupid—they knew the best way to control what other nations thought was to control how they talked. And when those languages died, so did those ways of thinking, those ways of looking at the world. They are dead, and we cannot get them back.”

“Are you one of those academics who keep trying to revive the Saypuri mother tongue?” Shara asked.

“No. Because Saypur was a big place, and had many mother tongues. Such vain, jingoistic missions do not interest me.”

“Then why waste your time looking at all?”

He lit his pipe. “We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present—do we not?”

And yet Pangyui had lied to her. He had used her to further his own secret ends.

She returns to work, knowing she has many hours ahead, and also, perhaps, to try to keep herself from remembering more.

It was two months into term when she met him again. She was in the library, reading about the political exploits of Sagresha, lieutenant to the Kaj and celebrated war hero, when she noticed someone had sat down at the table by the window.

His head was bowed, his curly, red-gold hair eclipsing his brow. He never seemed to sit in a chair right: he was sideways and almost on his back, with a tome in his lap about Thinadeshi, the engineer who had introduced the railways to the Continent.

Shara glared at him. She thought for a second, then stood up, gathered her books, sat down opposite him, and simply watched.

He did not look up. He turned a page and after a moment said, “And what would you want?”

“Why did you say that to me?” she asked.

He looked up at her through his curtain of messy hair. Though Shara was no drinker, she could tell by his puffy lids that he had what the masters at Fadhuri called a “morning head.” “What?” he asked. “From the tournament?”

She nodded.

“Oh, well.” He winced as if embarrassed and returned to his book. “Maybe to get a rise out of you. You seemed such a serious thing, after all. I hadn’t seen you smile all day, despite your admirable record.”

“But what did you mean?”

This provoked a long, confused stare. “Are you, erm, serious?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think I meant when I asked you for … a fuck?” he asked, slowly and uncertainly.

“No, not that.” Shara waved her hand. “That was obvious. The part about me … not being a girl.”

“That’s what you’re mad about? That?”

Shara simply glared back.

“Well, I mean,” he said. “Well, here. I have seen girls before. Many girls. You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age. And you, my dear, have probably been the spiritual equivalent of a fifty-three- or fifty-four-year-old woman since you were six years old. I can tell. You are not a girl.” He again returned to his book. “You are very much a woman. Probably an old one.”

Shara considered this. Then she took out her own study materials and began to read opposite him, feeling confused, outraged, and strangely flattered.

“That biography of Thinadeshi is shit, just so you know,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yes. The writer has an agenda. And his references are suspect.”

“Ah. His references. Very important.”

“Yes.”

He flipped a page.

“Incidentally,” he asked, “did you ever give much thought to the thing I said about fucking?”

“Shut up.”

He smiled.

They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?

But both of them agreed that their nations were in a bad, dangerous state: “Saypur has grown fat and weak off of commerce,” Shara said to him once. “We believe we can buy our safety. The idea that we must fight for it, fight for it every day, never crosses our minds.”

Vohannes rolled his eyes. “You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.”

“I am right,” she insisted. “Saypur got to where it is through military strength. Its civilian leadership is far too permissive.”

“What would you do? Have Saypuri children learn yet another oath, another pledge to Mother Saypur?” Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”

“You admire Saypur? As a Continental?”

“Of course I do! Not just because I wouldn’t catch leprosy here, which I can’t say of the Continent. But here, you allow people … to be people. Do you not know how rare a thing that is?”

“I thought you would wish for discipline and punishment,” said Shara. “Faith and self-denial.”

“Only Kolkashtani Continentals think that,” Vohannes said. “And it’s a bastard way to live. Trust me.”

Shara shook her head. “You’re wrong. Fervor and strength is what keeps the peace. And the world hasn’t changed that much.”

“You think the world is such a cold and bitter place, my dear Shara,” said Vohannes. “If your great-grandfather taught you anything, I’d hope it’d be that one person can vastly improve the lives of many.”

“Saying something so admiring of the Kaj on the Continent would get you killed.”

“A lot of things on the Continent would get me killed.”

Both simply assumed that, as educated children of power, they would change the world, but neither could agree on the best way to change it: one day Shara would wish to write a grand, epic history of Saypur, of the world, and the next she would consider running for office, like her aunt; one day Vohannes would dream of funding a grand art project that would completely remake the Continental polises, and the next he would be shrewdly planning a radical business venture. Both of them hated the other’s ideas, and gleefully expressed that hatred with unchecked vitriol.

In retrospect, they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.

But it was more than that. Deep down, Shara knew she had never really had anyone else to talk to, to really talk to, until she met Vohannes, and she suspected he felt the same: they were both from famous, reputable families, they were both orphans, and they were both intensely isolated by their circumstances. Much like the game they’d played in the tournament, their relationship was one they invented day by day, and it was one only they could understand.

When she was not studying in her first and second year of college, Shara was engaged in what she would later feel to be a simply unfathomable amount of sex. And on the weekends, when the academy maids would stay home and everyone could sleep in, she’d stay in his quarters, sleeping the day away in his arms, and she would wonder exactly what she was doing with this foreigner, this boy from a place she was supposed to hate with all of her heart.

She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.

How stupid are the young, Shara would later think, that they cannot see what is right in front of them.

Shara sits back in her chair and studies her work:

3411 HIGH STREET, SAINT MORNVIEVA BANK, BOX 0813, GHIVENY TAORSKAN 63611

She wipes sweat from her brow, checks her watch. It is three in the morning. And once she realizes it, she finds it feels like it.

Now the real difficulty, thinks Shara. How to get at whatever is in this box.

There’s a knock at her door. “Come in,” she says.

The door swings open. Sigrud lumbers in, sits down before her desk, and begins to fill his pipe.

“How did it go?”

He pulls an odd face: confusion, dismay, slight fascination.

“Bad?”

“Bad,” he says. “Good, some. Also … odd.”

“What happened?”

He stuffs his pipe in his mouth with some hostility. “Well, the woman of the two, she works at the university. She is a maid … Irina Torskeny. Unmarried. No family. Nothing besides her work. I checked her rotation—she cleaned the professor’s office, quarters. All of it. She has been assigned to Dr. Pangyui’s offices since he got here.”

“Good,” says Shara. “We’ll look into her, then.”

“The other one … the man, though …” Sigrud recounts his confusing exploits in the ravaged neighborhoods of Bulikov.

“So the man just … vanished?” asks Shara.

Sigrud nods.

“Was there a sound of any kind? Like a whip crack?”

Sigrud shakes his head.

“Hm,” says Shara. “If it had been a whip crack, I would have thought it—”

“Paresi’s Cupboard.”

“Parnesi.”

“Whatever.”

Shara rubs her temple, thinking. Although Saint Parnesi has been dead for hundreds of years, his works continue to bother her: he’d been a priest of the Divinity Jukov who fell passionately in love with a Kolkashtani nun. As the Divinity Kolkan held very dour views on the appeal of sex, Parnesi found it difficult to visit his lover in her nunnery. Jukov—being a mercurial, clever Divinity—created a miracle that would allow Parnesi to hide in plain sight from enemies both mortal and Divine: a “cupboard” or an invisible pocket of air, which he could step inside at any moment, which allowed him to infiltrate the nunnery easily.

But, of course, one could use the miracle for less jovial purposes. Just two years ago it took Shara the better parts of three months to figure out the source of a documents leak in Ahanashtan. The culprits turned out to be three trade attachés who had, somehow, discovered the miracle, and if one of them had not been so liberal with his cologne—for Parnesi’s Cupboard does nothing to mask scent—Sigrud might have never caught him. But caught him he did, and things had turned quite grisly.… Though the man did quickly surrender the names of his associates.

“I feared the miracle had become popularized, after Ahanashtan,” says Shara. “Something like that … It could be catastrophic. But if it’s not Parnesi … And you’re sure he vanished?”

“I can find people,” says Sigrud with implacable, indifferent confidence. “I could not find this man.”

“Did you see him pull out a sheet of silver cloth? Jukov’s Scalp supposedly did something similar.… But no one’s seen a piece of it in forty years. It would look like a silver sheet.”

“Your suggestions ignore a bigger problem,” says Sigrud. “Even if this man was invisible, he would have fallen several stories to his death.”

“Oh. Good point.”

“I saw nothing. I scoured the streets. I scoured the area. I asked questions. I found nothing. But …”

“But what?”

“There was a moment … when I did not feel like I was where I was.”

“What does that mean?”

“I do not quite know,” admits Sigrud. “It was as if I was somewhere … older. I saw buildings that were not really there.”

“What sort of buildings?”

Sigrud shrugs. “There are no words for what I saw.”

Shara adjusts her glasses. This is troubling.

“Progress?” asks Sigrud, looking at the clutch of lamps and mounds of paper. “I see you have drunk what looks like three pots of tea.… So the news will be either very good or very bad.”

“Like you, the news is both. The message is a safety deposit box, in a bank. The only question is, how to get to it?”

“You are not sending me to rob a bank, are you?”

“Good gracious, no,” says Shara. “I can only imagine the headlines …” And, she thinks, the body count.…

“Are there no strings you can pull?”

“Strings?”

“You are a diplomat,” says Sigrud. “The City Fathers, they are puppets, more or less—right? Can’t you use them?”

“To a small extent. I could force them, perhaps, unless the box is being watched. And it seems Pangyui was being watched very, very closely. He was dealing with things … that I did not know he was dealing with. He did not tell me, it seems, the whole truth.” She looks up at Sigrud. “I am not sure if I should tell you, in fact. But I will, if you ask.”

Sigrud shrugs. “I do not really care, to be frank.”

Shara does not bother to hide her relief. One of the things she values most about her “secretary” is how little he cares for the intricacy of obfuscation: Sigrud is a hammer in a world of nails, and he is satisfied knowing only that.

“Good,” says Shara. “I would not wish to make it known that we have unusual interest in Pangyui’s researches—for them to know that we do not know what Pangyui knew would be … Well. Unwise. We will need to be more subtle in our arrangements. I am just not quite sure how, yet.”

“So what do we do now?”

At first Shara is not sure what to say. But then she slowly realizes she has been thinking of a strategy all night: she was just not aware she was thinking of it.

Her heart sinks as she realizes what the solution is: yet she is so sure it would work she knows she’d be a fool not to try it.

“Well,” says Shara. “We do have one lead. Who do we have at the Ministry who’s good with finance?”

“Finance?”

“Yes. Banking, specifically.”

Sigrud shrugs. “I think I recall hearing Yonji is still there.”

She makes a note of it. “He’ll do. I’ll have to contact him very soon to check.… I think I am right. But I will need him to confirm the exact financial arrangements.”

“So we are still on our own? Just you, and I, against the whole of Bulikov?”

Shara finishes her note. “Hm. No. I doubt if that will do. Start sending out feelers. I expect we will need to recruit at least a few bodies, or a few eyes. They cannot know this has any involvement with the Ministry. But you are usually quite good with contractors.”

“How much are we willing to pay them?”

Shara tells him.

“That is why I seem so good with contractors,” he says.

“Very good. Now the last thing. I must ask you—do you have any party clothes?”

Sigrud lazily gestures at his mud-spattered boots and smog-stained shirt. “What about this,” he asks, “isn’t appropriate for a party?”

In the predawn light, Shara waits for sleep, and remembers.

It was toward the middle part of their relationship, though neither she nor Vohannes knew it then. She had found him sitting beneath a tree, watching the rowing team practicing in the Khamarda River, next to the academy. The girls’ team had just set their shell in the water and was climbing in. When Shara joined him and sat in his lap, as she often did, she felt a soft lump pressing into her lower back.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

“About what?” he said.

“What do you think?”

“I try not to think at all when outdoors, dear. It tends to ruin things so.”

“Should I be worried,” she said, “that your favor might one day wander to another girl?”

Vohannes laughed, surprised. “I didn’t know you were so jealous, my battle-ax!”

“No one is jealous until they have reason to be.” She reached around, grabbed the lump. “And that seems like a reason.”

He grunts, not displeased. “I hadn’t realized we were quite so formal.”

“Formal? This is an issue of formality?”

“It is to me. So, what is it to be, then? Are you saying you assume you are mine, and I yours, dear? Are you sure you wish to be my girl, forever and ever, and belong only to me?”

Shara was silent. She looked away.

“What?” said Vohannes.

“Nothing.”

“What?” he said again, frustrated. “What have I said now?”

“It’s nothing!”

“It’s obviously not nothing. The very air has just turned colder.”

“It should be nothing. It’s … it’s my thing. A … Saypuri thing.”

“Oh, just say it already, Shara. Let me learn it, at least.”

“I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? Calling someone yours. Saying they belong to you. Me being your girl. But we don’t say things like that here. And you might not understand … but then, your people have never been owned. And it sounds very different coming out of your mouth, Vo.”

Vohannes took in a sharp breath. “Oh, gods, Shara, you know I didn’t mean to—”

“I know you didn’t. I know that to you, it was a perfectly innocent thing to say. But being owned, and making someone yours—they have different meanings here. We don’t say them. People still remember what it was like, before.”

“Well,” said Vohannes, suddenly bitter, “we don’t. We lost that. It was taken from us. By your damn great-grandfather, or whatever.”

“I hate it when you talk about tha—”

“Oh, I know you do. But at least your people have your memories, however unpleasant they are. You’re allowed to read about my history here. Hells, this school’s library has more information on us than we do! But if I tried to bring any of it home, I’d be fined or jailed or worse, by your people.”

Shara, abashed, did not answer. Both of them turned to the river. A cygnet stabbed its dark bill down among the reeds; its long white neck came thrashing up with the pumping, panicked legs of a tiny white frog trapped in its mouth.

“I hate this,” said Vohannes.

“What?”

“I hate feeling we are different.” A long pause. “And feeling, I suppose, that we do not really know each other.”

Shara watched as the rowing teams did sprints across the water, triceps and quadriceps rippling in the morning light. First the girls’ team passed, followed by the boys, dressed in considerably less clothing and showing quite a bit more muscle.

And was it her imagination, but did the lump in her back move just a little as the boys’ team emerged from the shadow of a willow and broke into sunlight?

He sighed. “What a day.”