Right says, “We have someone whose authority he may be more familiar with.”

  Left pulls out a case file from the deep reaches of the black coat, sets the file at the center of the desk.

  I pull out the blank pages, press my palm to the first page, watchwords bleed out.

  “We’ve acquired a click from the Liberation of Jabow,” Right says. “We emptied the prison camps and brought back one of theirs. Ready to work for us now.”

  I skim the text. He’s some genetic anomaly, splicing experimentation, forced starvation, selective breeding, but no organic technologies. No weapons breeding.

  “I thought Jabow was a weapons-breeding compound,” I say. “I thought we were getting a hold of their weapons tech with that raid, not just some smart kid.”

  “His name is Jan,” Left says.

  “A click, then?” I say.

  I look up into two pairs of black eyes.

  “I can find Keli on my own,” I say.

  Left and Right exchange black glances.

  Right says: “You have three days to find Keli. After three days, the Council will have an end to this. It ends with the purging of Keli. Or the purging of you. You understand.”

  I understand. I know all about spilling someone else’s blood to purge my own ghosts.

  Disinterred: Jan

  My face in the palm of my hand: I dream in chalky blues and red. I can’t eat, my throat won’t swallow, so they hook me up to tubing, drip drip drip.

  I can see the strings around us all now; they’re silky, wormy, organic, just like the rest of their tech. They call it tech. I call it slavery.

  I dream of cats, cats curling around me, warm, purring. Soothing me to sleep. I can eat again. Some soup. Suit soup. I like to say that out loud sometimes now, I don’t know why: a soup of Suits.

  The nurse helps me out of bed and walks me to the garden. There’s a physical shield over the garden, she says, not an organic one, since their organics make me so sick. There’s a high wall around the garden. I can’t see over it. There are spikes at the top, long as my fingers, silver spikes. All of the plants are tall and big and leafy.

  The nurse is afraid of me. No one else comes into the house. They are still leaving me books, Opposition texts. They want me to do something for them, to do what I did in Jabow before they destroyed everything, before I was put into the hole. But I still tear out all of the pages. I eat them.

  I sleep and my dreams are cats’ dreams. I sleep all day, twenty-eight hours, sleep and I’m still tired. They have cleaned out the bacteria from the water, all of the water, in the basin and tub and toilet. My rash is gone. The boils have scarred over.

  They are here.

  I wake up. I am shaking.

  I hear footsteps, a new voice.

  A figure turning into my doorway, black, all in black, with skin of burnished brown and black black hair and black black eyes. It’s one of them. The Suits. They will burn this place down again, burn it down and twist me open …

  The Suit looks at me. Her eyes are big, her body tense. “I’m licensed to interrogate you,” the Suit says. “Interrogation,” she says, louder.

  “You are the one who stirs the Suits,” I say.

  I see her hands shake. She puts them in her pockets. She is tall and broad like the men in Jabow who tried to destroy me, and her face is square and straight with lines at the eyes, there, just where they close. She has to close her eyes more than most people. I can see that.

  But she does not close her eyes at me.

  Systems: Narsis

  He? It? War criminal. Prison camps. For how long they kept him there with the other prisoners in Jabow before they realized what he was, I don’t know. It wasn’t in the case file.

  I should have expected him to look like this, skin over bone, hollowed cheeks, shaved head—looks too big for his body, a bobbing melon on a stick. But it is the eyes that pull me. Big, blue-green, with long, black lashes. That pairing, big eyes and long lashes, is boyishly coy; alluring, attractive in this emaciated body of which nothing can be boyish or coy.

  “I am Jan,” he says.

  I want to touch him, to see if he’s really alive. Can you be that skinny and be alive? Where do you keep all of your internal organs?

  “Narsis,” I say.

  The too-big head bobs.

  Silence again.

  “I’m told that you were bred by the Opposition,” I say, finally. “You were bred to be an organic communications hub.”

  The lids close over the eyes, the lashes flutter. He looks at me again. I want him to keep looking at me.

  “I studied systems,” Jan says. “The cyclical nature of universal systems. When you look up at the stars, you’re only seeing systems, complex relationships between bodies of mass identical in make-up, mutation and construction to the smaller internal systems within the body.”

  She wanted to sell him he didn’t study systems, he was a system, but it was likely the Opposition never told him that.

  I think about blindfolds and Lisha and broken bones, bruised bodies. Interrogation will kill this little bird. And he’s mad, broken to pieces.

  “When you look out at the universe, all you see is yourself, looking in,” Jan says. “Cyclical systems. Abbreviated, simplified version. We were still working out the mathematics. And then they killed the cats.”

  “The cats,” I say.

  He is twisted up in his sheets so tightly I think he’s cutting off the circulation to all the limbs of his body.

  He leans toward me as far as he can in the bundle of sheets and says, “Ask them about the cats.”

  I am wasting my time. I turn to go, leave my back to him, stride to the doorway.

  “You vomit afterward.”

  I stop. I wait until I’m sure he’s not going to say anything else. I turn. He’s staring at me, little hands still fisted in the sheets.

  “Ask them about the cats,” Jan says. He buries his head into the pillows.

  I walk out into the hall, still shaking, and I have to grab onto the edge of the kitchen table to catch my balance. The nurse is talking to me. I can hear her voice, but it’s muted, distant, and I’m breathing too fast. I vomit

  The nurse is grabbing me with her fleshy hands. She has a needle in her hand. I hate needles. She sits me down into a chair, and I’m still shaking. I ask for kaj, but when she gives me some I choke on it and spit it back into my palm, bloody red.

  Liberation: Narsis

  I sleep for twelve hours. All of my case files are on my crashed system, destroyed by the dirty click. So I chew enough kaj to numb all sense and go upstairs to ask for Defense. They give me two new Defense Suits and sit me down in the conference room.

  The haze of the filter makes me dizzy.

  “The cats,” I say.

  The new Left and Right look at one another.

  “They’re an unknown,” Left says. “We have as of yet to ascertain the exact nature of their function. The Liberation party found him with cats.”

  “How many?” I say.

  “Four,” Left says.

  Right says, “The Liberation party found him in a steel room built into the ground and sealed in a steel escape hatch. Opposition put him there when their lines broke six months before, hoping to hide him until they could come back for him.”

  “Did he eat the cats?” I say.

  Right frowns at me. “Of course not.”

  “The Liberation party killed them,” Left says. “He wouldn’t leave without the cats. We’ll give you the relevant case file.”

  “My system’s down.”

  “Get a click to store them for you,” Left says.

  “I don’t work with clicks,” I say.

  “What do you think he is?” Left says. “He’s their version of click, a system on his own, without having to jack in. He’s connected to everything already, or he was supposed to be, before we broke Opposition’s lines and they withdrew from Jabow. There isn’t a security measure we’ve devised that can stop him. He’s brimming with data. The identity of your troublesome rebel should be easy, if he could sort it from the rest.”

  “But he doesn’t need an agent to direct and translate,” I say. “He’s both, then. Click and agent?”

  “He’s something else,” Right says, glaring over at Left. “We’ll consult on how much information can be released to you.”

  “We need you to take care of this,” Left says, slowly. “Your expertise in the area is … unmatched.”

  They release another file to me. I don’t call in a click to store them for me. I take them to my room and spread them out on the bed. I press my palms to the pages, watch the text bleed out.

  Jan, in a hole in the ground for six months, lying stagnant, forgotten, with food and cats and running water and no organic tech. It was all mechanized: electric lighting, water piped in through some kind of pump system. I don’t understand much about Opposition tech. What I see is Jan described as they found him: sick-thin, maggot-pale, lying in the center of a metal floor, surrounded by cats. The food had run out two weeks before. The Liberation party tried to move him, but the cats attacked them. “Four big cats, about four or five kilos apiece,” the report says. Jan started screaming and the Liberation party tasered the cats.

  Liberation put him into a holding cell with the rest of the prisoners of war for three years until Defense realized what he was and pulled him out for experiments; only a handful of sentences about this part have bled onto the page, bits about neural activity and massive allergic reactions. Then they brought him to the Kettering compound, sealed him inside his own self-contained unit, and peeled all of the organic tech out of it to curb his violent allergies.

  They sealed him in and shut him up, deemed him “mentally and emotionally unstable for any relevant study until recovery.”

  I shake my head and push the files off the bed. I am chasing the words of a mad prisoner, and Keli is turning my agents, and Defense wants me purged if I can’t find out who he is. Three days. Not enough.

  I try to sleep, but the dreams are bad. I wake up sweating, but cold, and I’m out of kaj. I lie in the center of my bed and nod off into a milky half-haze that passes for sleep.

  Lisha buzzes me. I sit up and he’s standing out in the hall, just outside the sheer filter over my door. I hit the admit switch and the filter light turns green. He walks in, already neatly dressed, black hair slicked back. I check the time. Still six hours until dawn.

  His hands are in his pockets, but it’s too dark inside my room to see the expression on his face. “Situation,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you send me the data?”

  “System’s down.”

  “Your system?”

  “Our system. The main system. The hub is down. Everything is down. The entire Defense building and the Kettering compound are blind.”

  “Fuck,” I say, and inside my head, it becomes a litany: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

  I’m naked, and I dress in front of Lisha. He steps close and smooths the collar of my coat. This close, I can see his face, the hard, square jaw, the black bruises beneath his eyes, the slight curl of his upper lip. He is all planes and angles.

  We walk into the belly of the Defense compound.

  The com hub is bubbled by a filter and two Defense Suits stand outside. They motion me past, tell me I’ve got clearance, but my skin still prickles as I step through the filter.

  Flire and Gri and Mesta are already inside, looking like they haven’t slept for three days. They probably haven’t. The usual hum of the system is absent, but the clicks are still jacked in all along the circumference of the room. Their agents, a dozen of them, stand at the operations console, answering questions from Gri and Mesta, translating data from the clicks.

  Flire beckons me over to the entry shaft leading up into the glutinous tubular guts of the system.

  “You found the altered pathways?” I ask.

  Flire nods. “Come up and take a look at them,” she says. “It’s not anything I’ve seen before.”

  She leads the way up the rungs of the ladder. There’s a platform at the top that overlooks the nest of system tubing, the nexus of the system’s brain. I step up next to Flire and she points out over the mass of greenish tubes to a dark, cancerous growth of black big enough to house at least three click/agent pairs.

  “Someone’s been injecting saline into these spider veins the past two weeks,” Flire says.

  “Can you read the signature of who did it?”

  “You think this was one of ours?”

  “Opposition doesn’t know our tech. They’d find a way to burn it or blow it up before mixing a virus. This is internal. We can trace the virus back to its jack-in point.” And from there, Flire could just go through the records of jacked-in clicks and see who’d been jacking in there the last two weeks. Easy.

  “Narsis!”

  I look down at the bottom of the shaft. “Message for you!” Lisha says. “Defense routed Priority.”

  I climb down and Lisha hands over the blue Priority paper. Of course, it’s on paper—the systems are down, but for a moment I can’t understand why anyone would send me a paper transmission outside a Defense conference room.

  I press my palm to the page, watch blue letters bleed out, only one sentence:

  THE CATS SAY THE NAME ISN’T KELI.

  Cold creeps up my spine, and despite the kaj I’m chewing, my hands start to shake. I don’t need to ask Defense who they routed it from.

  I shove the paper deep into my pocket.

  I tell Lisha he’s got first, just as Gri hands him a jack-in knife for printing.

  “Location for recovery?” he says. In case I died on duty.

  “Kettering compound,” I say.

  He hands over the silver jack-in knife. “Drop this by there for printing, then?”

  I take the knife by the hilt, slip it into my coat. I have an aversion for jack-in knives, but in this job, I must put up with many things I find abhorrent.

  Dense as Blindness: Narsis

  The nurse does not expect me. I find that odd since Jan can’t send transmissions on his own. All our tech is organic. Trying to send a transmission himself would have triggered another violent allergic reaction. He must have sent it through her, but she looks at me as an unwelcome annoyance, a stranger stirring her from sleep.

  She takes me to him in her brooding way, and when I walk into his room I see that it’s dark. The cold comes back, creeping up my spine, across my shoulders.

  “Jan?” I say.

  The nurse pushes past me into the room, bringing a candle with her. Yes, a wax and wick candle, the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in ag compounds. She lights four or five more on the desk by the bed and I see stacks of texts there, actual paper texts that could only have been made by Opposition. We haven’t used that kind of archaic tech in almost a century.

  He’s staring toward the window on the other side of the room. He is loosely wrapped in his sheets, so all I can see is his shaved head.

  “You sent for me,” I say.

  The nurse shuffles back out into the hallway, but I see her looking back into the room.

  “Ask me questions,” Jan says, softly. “That’s what you do. You ask questions.”

  “How do you know about Keli?”

  “I am the world,” Jan says.

  “What’s his real name? If it isn’t Keli … and how do you know?”

  “We’re all just systems looking out and seeing in.”

  I’m tired. Flire says she’ll have a jack-in point and sig pattern match in less than an hour.

  “Did you ask them about the cats?” he says. He is still looking at the window.

  “The cats are dead,” I say, too loud. “I can haul you down to interrogation, if it comes to that, but we’re running out of time.”

  “Ask me about the cats,” he says.

  I want to hit him and watch the melon head snap off the little bowed stalk of his neck and bounce against the wall.

  I walk to the door.

  I hope his fucking fat cats screeched when they burned.

  I stop. I half-turn.

  “How did the cats survive?” I say.

  Jan bats his lashes at me. “The cats,” he says.

  “You lived two weeks without food, there at the end. You were so emaciated you couldn’t move. But those cats were strong enough to attack the Liberation party, and they weighed in at four or five kilos apiece.”

  He smiles, and it’s eerie to watch him smile, the skin of his hollow face stretched tight, the leering death mask. “You don’t see any strings, do you?” he says. “All those metal loops, but you’re blind. We are one thing, one system. What’s theirs is mine, mine is theirs. Symbiosis. One thing.”

  “Why did they leave you in there with cats?”

  “I wasn’t doing well with people. I had to make connections with other living things. Share information, and matter.”

  He existed as a communications hub, incapable of interacting with human beings, so they tested him on cats?

  “You’re not functional,” I say. Jan’s outdated, but even outdated, he’s linking things, he’s linking to people, he’s sending me messages even though he’s sitting here with no organic tech … no tech but himself.

  The words are out of me already, “Keli’s a system. Like you. Only he works.”

  Jan squirms in the bed. I imagine him purring. “You’re not so dense as blindness.”

  “Where is he, this system?” I say.

  “He’s afraid of you,” Jan says.

  “Everyone’s afraid of me,” I say.

  I am disgusted with him; this broken, mad thing.

  I leave him.

  I walk back to the Defense compound, back to the stir of Suits, and I’ve chewed so much kaj that I’m having trouble walking. I keep putting out my hand to the walls of the corridor for balance, but all I can feel is the pressure, yes, there, and I think that means I’m real, I exist, but I’m not sure.

  Flire, Gri, Mesta, and Lisha are all waiting for me. Lisha’s at the doorway of the interrogation offices when I come in, and he’s immediately at my right hand. He knows. My lips are blood red with kaj.