The Windup Girl(111)

"About what?" He's playing solitaire on the bar.

"Going north."

He glances up at her, then flips another set of cards. He's quiet for a second. "That's tough work. Not something you set up in a day."

"Have you asked?"

He glances at her. "Yeah. I asked. And no one's going anywhere while the white shirts are pissed off about the Jaidee massacre. I'll let you know when the situation changes."

"I want to go north."

"You already told me. Earn up, and it will happen."

"I earn plenty. I want to go now."

Raleigh's slap comes fast, but she sees it coming. It is fast for him, but not for her. She watches his hand proceed toward her face with the sort of servile gratitude that she used to feel when Gendo-sama took her to dinner at a fancy restaurant. Her cheek stings and then floods with puffy numbness. She touches it with her fingers, savoring the wound.

Raleigh looks at her coldly. "You'll go when it's damn well convenient."

Emiko bows her head slightly, allowing the well-deserved lesson to filter into her core. "You aren't going to help me, are you?"

Raleigh shrugs, goes back to his cards.

"Does it even exist?" she asks.

Raleigh glances over at her. "Sure. If it makes you happy. It's there. If you keep hassling me about it, it doesn't. Now get out of my face."

The falcon dangles dead. She is dead. Mulch for composters. Meat for the city, rot for gaslights. Emiko stares at Raleigh. The falcon lies dead.

And then she thinks that some things are worse than dying. Some things can never be borne.

Her fist is very fast. Raleigh-san's throat is soft.

The old man topples, hands flying to his throat, eyes wide with shock. It is all slow-motion: Daeng turning at the sound of the stool clattering to the floor; Raleigh sprawling, his mouth working, trying to suck air; the cleaning man dropping his mop; Noi and Saeng at the other side of the bar with their men waiting to escort them home, all of them turning toward the sound, and every one of them is slow.

By the time Raleigh hits the floor, Emiko is already bolting across the room, toward the VIP door and the man who hurt her most. The man who sits and laughs with his friends and thinks nothing of the pain he inflicts.

She slams into the door. Men look up with surprise. Heads turn, mouths open to cry out. The bodyguards are reaching for their spring guns, but all of them are moving too too slow.

None of them are New People.

30

Pai crawls up beside Kanya, stares down at the shadow village below. "That's it?"

Kanya nods and glances back at the rest of her squad, who have spread out to cover the other approaches to the shrimp farms where they breed bitter water-resistant prawns for the Krung Thep fish markets.

The houses are all on bamboo rafts currently grounded, but when the floods come, the houses will float, rising, as water and silt rushes across their paddy and ponds. Her own family on the Mekong used something similar long years ago, before General Pracha came.

"It was a good lead," she murmurs.

Ratana had been almost ecstatic. A link, a clue: fish mites between the third body's toes.

And if fish mites, then shrimp farms, and if shrimp farms then the only ones that would have sent a worker into Bangkok. And that meant shrimp farms that had experienced a die-off. Which led her to this Thonburi half-floating settlement with all of her men at the edge of the embankment, ready to raid in the darkness.

Down below, a few candles flicker inside the bamboo houses. A dog barks. They're all wearing their containment suits. Ratana insisted that the likelihood of a jump was slender, and yet still a worry. A mosquito whines in Kanya's ear. She slaps it away and draws her containment suit's hood tight. Starts to sweat in earnest.

The sound of laughter carries across the fish ponds. A family, all together in the warmth of their hut. Even now, with all their hardship, people still can laugh. Not Kanya, though. Something in her is broken, it seems.

Jaidee always insisted that the Kingdom was a happy country, that old story about the Land of Smiles. But Kanya cannot think of a time when she has seen smiles as wide as those in museum photos from before the Contraction. She sometimes wonders if those people in the photos were acting, if perhaps the National Gallery is intended to depress her, or if it is really true that at one point people smiled so totally, so fearlessly.

Kanya pulls her mask over her face. "Send them in."

Pai signals the men, and then her troops are all up and over the edges, coming down on the village, surrounding it as they always do before the burning begins.

When they came to her own village, the white shirts appeared between two huts in the space of a minute, flares hissing and sparking in their hands. This is different. No blaring megaphones. No officers splashing through ankle-deep waters, dragging screaming people away from their houses as bamboo and WeatherAll burst orange and alive with flame.

General Pracha wants it quiet. As he signed the quarantine waivers he said, "Jaidee would have turned this into an emergency, but we don't have the resources to stir the cobra nest with Trade and also handle this. It could even be used against us. Deal with this quietly."

"Of course. Quietly."

The dog starts barking madly. It's joined by others as they approach. A few villagers come out on their porches, peer out into the darkness. Catch the gleam of white in the night. They shout warnings to their families as Kanya's white shirts break into a run.