It gives her directions in a perky tourmaline voice and instructs her to avoid contact with candidates other than her own. She is received at the gate by a guidance routine taking the form of a red-beaked crane. Within the Institute’s walls the wasteland sky is blocked out by a seashell husk, bred into immensity to shield the entire compound. Strange-sounding names crowd in a white-noise fog, synthetic and toneless. Others are in Dakman with a smattering of Yingman recounting casualties. Some are foreign, some are in Putongwa and Fukginwa. Some of the interference nevertheless slips through, crooning ancient lullabies of wars eons gone, status dispatches from combat centuries ended. This close, ignoring the wasteland of charred clay and half-alive intelligences is impossible, though Heilui tries to focus elsewhere, lash her attention to the interior of the car and the imminent appointment. The Institute, the halfway house, sits ensconced in the hothouse hill: mantled in rough foliage, insulated from the machine ruins and their radiative hunger. “I’m on my way,” Heilui whispers, “to meet my bride.” She cups her palm over the antique bowl, fingering its chimera texture, rough earth striated with the velvet smoothness of precious metal. They exchange small talk: he is heading southwest for a research lab, armed with a postgraduate grant from the University of Rajamongkol. A young man takes the seat opposite, giving her a respectful distance. The compartment opens in a murmur of dry, rustling leaves. She sweeps up the gifts and blanks out the news feed. The train notifies her that another passenger will be joining her, transferred after one of the carriages have detached for another station. Foreign antique, contributed by a wealthy adventurer aunt. A kintsugi bowl: black pottery broken and mended in silver, the seams radiant with age. Her lap is heavy with gifts prepared by relatives: engagement boxes of jade bangles and figurines, silk slippers threaded in gold, a bag of crystallized fruits. Heilui’s hands are clammy with the sweat of remembered terror, the memory of teetering on the edge of freefall. Pulling at her like the questions from back then, the faces and names lined up and Did you associate with this woman? This man? This woman? This man, this man, this man. The footage never fails to pull at her heart like the moon exerting its gravity on the acid tides.
She has watched it many times has been made to, during the interrogation.
The other half she fills with a news feed: disasters in montage, kaleidoscope of calamities-cities gone dark and still, streets turned to web-cracks and sidewalks impact-raised into briars, balconies smeared in blackened lymph and rust-red blots. Heilui keeps half the window opaque to block out the field of endless machine-dead, the sight of satellites pressed against the skyline like bruised mouths on a gash. New Year: the train eels along a landscape of red snow and shadow-dust, on carbonate tracks haloed in anemic light.
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