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At last it stood. The footsteps had paused abruptly. Nissaea heard snatches of words, as clear as hallucinations of water:
illegal, hollow, rats in the tunnels.
She cursed inwardly.

“This way,” she breathed, glancing back once. She couldn’t see anything; had it sunk back down? But she couldn’t afford to wait any longer, either. She padded to the exit leading downward and plunged past. Dank air soughed through the darkness, smelling nauseatingly of metallic precipitates and mold.

The Watch was tapping, tapping, tapping. She could hear their scanners’ thrum at the base of her skull. It wouldn’t be long before they located her confounders and destroyed them.

Nissaea heard an intake of breath, and risked turning on the smallest of lights, a pin-flicker in her wrist. It was the only thing in her prosthetic that still functioned. “Don’t lose sight of me in the mazeways,” she said without slowing down. “Stay close. I won’t have time to backtrack and search for you.”

“Yes,” the stranger said, very quietly.

The distinct sizzle-zap-pop of confounders being overloaded followed them into the mazeways. Nissaea’s darkvision helped her less than she would have liked. Most well-equipped scavengers opted for wide-spectrum oculars for situations like this. However, Nissaea had spent many hours in the mazeways, and she knew them well. In the swollen shadows, she could see great wheels of uncertain diameter and unknown purpose, wrecked resonators, crystal displays roused to phantom splendor in this faintest of lights. The footing was unsure, and more than once she had to slow, as much as she hated any delay, to pick a safe route through the corrugated rubble.

Clanging noises tracked them through the mazeways, knotting and unknotting in unsettling bursts. Nissaea reminded herself more than once to breathe. If the Watch was close enough to hear her breathing, she’d already have a bullet in her back anyway. By this point she had forgotten about her impetuous decision to drag the stranger with her. If anything, she assumed it had gotten lost some time back.

Then she heard a shout, distant but angry. For once she lost her composure and bolted forward and to the right without having any clear plan for where to go next, panic translated into pure motion. Her foot caught hard on something hard and thin, a wire perhaps. She went down. Only the habits of survival kept her from crying out as she thumped down with appalling loudness against a shape made of sharp angles. Her palms were scraped raw, and her breath whooshed out between her teeth.

“I’m here,” the stranger said in its soft, colorless voice. Nissaea was too busy fighting back sobs to answer, or even to be surprised at its presence. It didn’t bother her with further attempts at conversation. Instead, it offered its hand, gently at first, then more insistently. Once she understood its intent—the pain was making her stupid—she accepted its help stumbling to her feet. A deep roar reverberated through the passages, and she flinched: they were getting awfully close.

Her shin throbbed abominably and a sticky warmth soaked her pant leg. She risked fumbling for a tube of skinseal, almost dropping it in her haste, and rolled up her pant leg to apply it as best she could in the dark. It didn’t feel as though she’d quite covered the wound, but it would have to do.

Another roar. Footsteps and their echoes pattered through the mazeways like a drumroll. Nissaea wasn’t one of the lucky people with an acoustic analyzer that, combined with an up-to-date map, would tell her exactly where the sounds were coming from. The mazeways changed hourly, little by little, and mapping them was a profession in itself.

“Where?” the stranger said. She realized it was asking the question for the second time.

“They won’t gas us,” Nissaea said, a hope she would normally have kept to herself, except the pain was still muddling her thoughts. The mazeways connected too many inhabited areas, or more accurately, too many areas inhabited by people who paid protection money to the Watch, or who had influence with the city’s high circles. “But they haven’t given up.”

“I can still hear them,” the stranger agreed, just as softly as before. “Point the way.”

Nissaea squinted into the shadows. For a horrible moment she couldn’t tell where they were. Then she found the passage she remembered and pointed. The stranger took her hand again and led her in.

Nissaea wasn’t one of those people who was timelocked to the city’s cycles. She spent the next interval in a haze, guiding them each time the stranger squeezed her hand. Ordinarily the power drain of her implants would have given her some indication of passing time, but she was having trouble monitoring her internals, and the few that had associated clocks had never been all that reliable.

She came out of her haze when they ran into the corpse. The stranger didn’t seem to notice it, or didn’t slow when they approached it, at any rate. In all fairness, Nissaea almost didn’t notice it herself. There was no smell of blood, or shit, or decay, or any of the weary universals she associated with death. Instead, a wavering, almost aquatic fragrance permeated the air, as of certain preservatives.

The corpse had had its spine cracked backwards into a bridge-like arc, and was suspended by a spider-profusion of wires that led tautly to the chamber’s walls and ceiling. Unfocused glass beads shone from the wires, held in place by barbed hooks. No evidence remained of whatever tools had been used to pound open the sternum and scrape out the organs, or extract the eyes—she could just barely see the trails that the optic nerves made down the corpse’s face, arranged into butterfly curves. In the low light it was impossible to discern colors clearly, probably a blessing. Everything appeared in washed-pale blues and sullen whites and silhouette blacks. The murderer had done an especially conscientious job of draining the blood, to the point where it almost wasn’t clear the corpse had ever possessed any.

“Are you hurt?” the stranger said, having finally noticed that Nissaea wasn’t moving forward.

“So it’s true about the murderer,” Nissaea said.

Nissaea wasn’t squeamish. She had seen her share of back-alley deaths, learning from an early age to hide when the Watch took out its need for hilarity on some vagabond. In particular, she’d learned enough to be distantly grateful that the guardsman who had taken her original hand, long ago, hadn’t thought of something more inventive to do.

Nevertheless, the corpse bothered her, mainly because of the finicky thoroughness with which it had been arranged. It was almost possible to regard it as a sculpture, or a puzzle. Focus on the cleanness of the incisions, of the precisely placed punctures that the wires made in the body, and you could admire the murderer’s skill; focus on the mathematical curve of the spine and the graceful angles of the limbs, and you had to wonder if the murderer had some aesthetic insight to convey.

“We should go,” the stranger said, only a little questioning. “There’s nothing useful left here.”

“What if the murderer’s down here looking for us too?” Nissaea said. There was an odd warning twinge in her leg, higher than the injury, and it worried her.

“Staying still won’t help us,” the stranger said dryly. “Please. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Nissaea looked away from the corpse, and they hobbled out of the chamber together. Her imagination insisted that the corpse was muttering at their backs, even if she couldn’t hear anything, and even if the flow of air currents was dank and steady.

They proceeded more carefully after that, alert to every chance clatter and pin-drop trickle of sound. It seemed that the Watch had lost their trail, or lost interest, anyway, but Nissaea couldn’t help flinching every time she heard something unexpected. To her mortification, her damaged hand went into convulsions just as they nudged their way onto a bridge of stiff swaying fibers, fingers spasming in rattling metallic syncopation.
Not now,
Nissaea begged the universe, although it was unlikely that it mattered at this point.

The stranger stopped, to her dismay. “This injury,” it said, gaze going directly to the prosthetic. “An old one?”

She tried to shove past it, which the bridge was too narrow to permit if it was determined not to let her. “It’s not important,” she said through her teeth. After all, she thought wildly, a hand that alternated between being dead and going into spasms still beat being cut up like the corpse back there. “We’re not far from the Cat-Eyed Gate. Let’s keep going.”

To her surprise, the stranger didn’t argue this, although she could sense its unhappiness. Why it wanted to deal with diagnostics just this moment was beyond her, but since it wasn’t pressing the point, neither would she.

At last the bridge was far behind them, and they reached the Cat-Eyed Gate. It had been mined out years ago, and nothing remained but the occasional chatoyant glimmer of green or blue or gold substrate.

“This is the gate?” the stranger asked.

By now Nissaea was panting softly. Her entire leg hurt now, hot raking fingers of pain that were even now reaching upward. “Yes,” she said, or thought she said. She wasn’t sure she had much of a voice left.

“Tell me where to take you,” the stranger said.

She had the vague thought that this had started with her intent to help the stranger and not the other way around. She opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. It wasn’t as though she had any allies left anyway. Then the pain clawed up again, toward groin and torso, and she collapsed into a vast constricting darkness.

When human explorers discovered the city, they thought it was another ruin from some earlier wave of colonization. It wasn’t until settlers had abandoned the ship over a doctrinal schism that people discovered the city’s peculiar properties.

The city, which the majority sect named Contemplating Orthodoxy, originally showed the blandest of faces to its settlers. It was a sphere orbiting a dismal sun, hollowed out by nonorthogonal passages and irregular chambers, like an apple cored by enthusiastic worms. The chambers were composed of corroded walls and beams of bent metal and unreliable floors. People assessed the structure, shored up what needed shoring up, built their own dwellings and factories from a combination of their own supplies and the city’s excess material, and moved in.

Not long afterward, the walls changed. And the floors. And the ceilings. And the columns, and the bridges, and the doors, and the occasional couch. At first the phenomenon was confined to items made of the city’s original material, but later everything was affected.

Contemplating Orthodoxy, it turned out, had what one of the early philosopher-poets called
mirror-nature.
When it was uninhabited, it lay quiescent. When humans crept into it, it reflected them according to its own kaleidoscope understanding.

The form the city’s understanding took was, so to speak, spare parts for its inhabitants. From the walls grew tangled tendrils of wire, and the tendrils fused together into bones of strong composites, and the bones hinged together into hands, or feet, or hips sheathed in plastic or metal. There were eyes in every conceivable color, growing like fervent grapes from pillars, the sensors glittering pale and vigilant; there were infrared sensors and scanners and seismic analyzers.

Most people were convinced that this signaled that the city was going to eat them. The riots that followed involved smashing, hacking, and huddling in shelters ineffectually treated with everything from insecticide to surfactants in hopes of warding off the unsettling growths. But one surgeon hit upon the idea of harvesting an eye from the city and implanting it in his brother. According to some accounts, he pitied his brother for an eye maimed in an accident involving a staple gun. According to less flattering stories, he was driven by malicious curiosity. (Why the brother didn’t resist or flee, they don’t say.) Either way, the experiment was a success. The filaments that emerged from the back of the cybernetic eye successfully interfaced with human nerves, and, as a side-effect, gave the surgeon’s brother the ability to see partway into the ultraviolet.

It didn’t take long for other surgeons to begin offering this service, to say nothing of eager charlatans. After all, the riots had resulted in any number of injuries, and the regenerative tanks that the settlers had brought with them were running low on the necessary gels. People came around to the idea that ready-made spare parts and enhancements weren’t such a bad thing, even if they came in outlandish colors. Scarcely any time passed before the outlandish colors became a motivation in themselves, and soon after that, the first Harvests were organized in earnest.

Nissaea dreamt for a long time of low-lidded octopuses floating through space so black it was red, or so red it was black; of stars the color of incisions, and a bird singing in a voice like a bone flute on the verge of breaking. When at last she struggled awake, she blinked crusted eyelids against light sere and pitiless, as though it were part of the dream itself. “Jeni?” she asked hoarsely, mistaking the shape in front of her for a circle-sister from years past. But of course Jeni had died in a Watch raid.

“This is a name?” said a voice she didn’t recognize at first. “It’s not one I know.” A smooth hand, although not a soft one, pressed itself against her wrist, testing—perhaps for her pulse.

She flinched. Something about her wrist felt wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Instead, she scrabbled uselessly among the blankets, scratchy but warmed by her own heat, for some weapon better than her fists—fist.

Fist. Her entire left hand was missing. It shocked her fully awake. She bolted out of the bed, blankets tangling her legs, and looked around, forcing herself to take in details that might help her escape. Walls that wound up to a cusp. No windows, although there were vents covered by lavender membranes, like fungus gills, that she might be able to tear through. The familiar whisk-whirr of the mass transit system somewhere beyond them. Flowers, of all things: not the cybernetic blossoms that the city produced, with their unwilting plastic petals and stamens shaped like upside-down catenary curves, but a dented steel can of genuine weeds, yellow-bright, with holes in the lopsided leaves. Next to the flowers was the exit she’d sought. The door was slightly ajar, and the stranger wasn’t standing in her way toward it.