“I visited a friend here, once.”
“You had a friend? Doubtful.”
A sculpture of a giant bird. The corpse of a dog. A ruined dollhouse.
By these signs they knew they were home.
Their tenth City.
After the Balcony Cliffs’ attack beetles had been repulsed, after the scavengers received the message, the three regrouped behind a door blocking off a corridor near the southern entrance. Easily defendable. The door’s graffiti featured laughing foxes playing in the desert, each with but a single eye. Chen drew in the second eye on each to balance the equation. Moss reinforced the microbial sensors. There should be no tickle, no trace so light that Moss should not know it in time.
Grayson distrusted the lack of resistance; they had repulsed multitudes in past versions. But though she trained her eye across beams, blueprints and ghost layers bursting across her line of sight … she could parse no threat beyond the usual.
Still …
“We should move up our timeline,” Grayson said.
“But not blind. Not from panic.”
“It’s not panic. It’s common sense.”
“What if the fish is stubborn? What if the fish resists?”
“I’ll go,” Chen said. “I will convince the fish.”
“No,” Moss said. “It must be me or some part of me.”
“Then I will stand watch.”
“We must just go in and do what we came here to do.”
“I’ll go,” Chen repeated, with the force of a slammed door.
But the door had already been shut. Grayson and Moss ignored him.
Soon they would need the blue fox to say yes to them. They would need to be sure the duck with the broken wing didn’t interfere.
Soon, too, their faery mode might not be enough. Sometimes they had to wear their contamination suits. Depending on Moss’s senses, Grayson’s eye, Chen’s prophecies. What did contamination mean in this City, and which way did it flow?
Each Company building was different. But recon had diminishing returns and too many risks. So they rehearsed their plan, with the aid of the old dollhouse found by Grayson (once again). The Company had seven floors, but it was still easier to visualize using dolls and furniture and rooms than diagrams scratched in the dirt. Some things never changed.
They must get some version of Moss inside the Company building, to compromise the portal wall, to infiltrate the wall of globes.
But they’d been wrong about one thing.
Chen was still there. Chen had been lying in wait. Chen had never ambushed them before. Chen had either been there or not been there. That was all.
An evil star.
Perhaps they should have aborted the mission right then, moved on, found another City, another Company.
viii.
like two people trying
to become one person
Chen ambushed Chen in a corridor distant from their apartment, near the swimming pool. Chen did not reach out to Moss or Grayson, who were already in the apartment; the danger seeped into their minds instead as an unease, took a long time to coalesce. Then burst forth as a star as radiant as Chen’s hand drifting bright across the horizon.
It happened too often. This withholding by Chen. This self-sacrifice. They could not tell if this was out of loyalty to his other self, from his pervading guilt, or the simple logic that it made no sense for all three of them to risk harm. Yet each time was more dangerous, for it had come to seem the Company sensed their presence, their mission, on some subconscious level. Thus cast out all Chens, or, in some cases, killed them, snuffed them out. Or made them more belligerent.
This Chen roared, brought down heavy fists on Chen’s back, cursing his own name, as Chen smashed into Chen’s midriff, already enraged by his termination.
They remained close as wrestlers, clasping each other’s shoulders with meaty hands. The sweat, ache of muscles, and desperation that choreographed their movements. Chen was confident and resigned; he knew from prior experience he likely must fight to the death, as much as he wished not to. Locked now in a fatal embrace, both sets of legs churning, wide stance, looking from above like some bizarre crab or starfish in two parts or like two people trying to merge and become one person.
“Submit,” Grayson’s Chen muttered in Chen’s ear.
“Never. Abomination. Traitor,” came the reply.
“Get out. Stop helping them. Stop the hurting.”
“Die die die.”
Felt the dissolve, fought it, came back into focus.
Chen, between grunts, tried to tear off Chen’s left ear with his teeth. So he let his ear fall off, spin across the empty ground, pick itself up, and lurch out of harm’s way.
Grayson’s Chen knew the panic, understood it: that this Chen could not conceive of the truth but knew another truth. The Company could make people if it wanted, and the thrashing, terrible intensity of attack, the visceral nature of it, meant that Chen, seeing Chen, understood this, too.
All the memories of Chen—of family continents away, of work history, of hobbies, of relationships—that this was a sham and a shame and that the only way to keep some sense of personhood was to destroy the invader. In some Cities, some Chens might fold under that weight, but most of the time it made the Chens fight long and hard and dirty.
Except Chen didn’t care if he was a made thing or not—Moss had cured him of that neurosis—and he had the advantage of having fought Chen before. He knew all of his moves, knew all the ways to end it, including how he had learned to adapt his flesh from Moss, that he could detach his hand and turn it into a dangerous flaming star flying through the sky.
Yet still Chen muttered at Chen as they struggled, pleading with this other self to submit, to give in, that they could work together if only Chen had a chance to explain. Trying again.
“Submit and join us. Two are better than one. What do you owe the Company?”
“Submit and the Company will welcome us back in. Submit and we can both have the life you had before.”
“A dead life?”
“Something to hold on to.”
But had Chen said that or had Moss’s Chen thought it? Who was lying to whom?
As Chen fought back and refused to submit, Grayson’s Chen grew weary. Not of the fight, for he had learned to love fighting because at least it ended in a vanquishing that denoted a kind of progress. But as he traded blows with himself—rabbit punches, kicks to the groin—Chen felt something sanded down finally and forever. As his fist struck Chen’s jaw and Chen’s fist struck him in the stomach. As they stumbled in the grapple, neither quite going to the ground, Chen realized he was weary of killing himself. He was tired.
This was the fourth time.
With a great spasm and twist of self-loathing, Chen moved to the side and locked his arm around Chen’s throat in a choke hold, clambered onto his back, and clasped Chen’s torso tight with his legs. Chen fell with Chen on top of him, bucking, trying to get at Chen with elbows, then trying to dislodge Chen’s legs.
Chen managed to twist enough to get his fingers under Chen’s choke hold and flip so that they were face-to-face on the uneven floor, in the dust and dirt next to the swimming pool. Now each had hands around the other’s throat, those bull-like necks, so close they could have