Day 17 of 30.
Lin Xiao was waiting for him in the little room when he got home.
She was sitting on the stool with her arms crossed and the lamp lit, and her bronze disc was on the table in front of her, and above it the post was still glowing, and the number under it was still going up while he stood in the doorway looking at it.
I don't know.
212,000,000 views.
"Sit," she said.
He sat on the bed.
"Do you know what you did?" she said. Her voice was quiet, and that was worse than shouting, much worse; he would have taken shouting. "Two hundred million people. The sponsors are going insane. Wen's Feed is calling you the Honest Prophet. The Pilgrims are putting your face on their banners, badly, you have three eyes on one of them. And a Human Dao elder just posted that you're the only sane man in the city."
"Is that bad?"
"I don't know!" She threw up her hands. "I don't know if it's good or bad! Nobody knows! You walked into the Pause camp with ten million people watching and you made the whole world look at us, and you didn't even ask me first!"
"I'm sorry."
"You keep saying sorry!" Her voice cracked down the middle. "Ever since you woke up. Sorry, sorry, sorry. You say it like it's a coin you can pay with."
He kept quiet, because she was right, and because every answer he had started with the same word.
"You're different," she said suddenly.
He looked up.
"You bow to old men. You say goodness me like somebody's aunt. You know Auntie Aru's tea. You call Master Qian Qian Ye like some southern boy." She was staring at him as if she was seeing him for the first time and did not like the light. "My brother never bowed to anyone in his life. My brother hated the Pavilion. He hated copying. He hated me asking him questions. You..."
Her voice stopped, as if it had walked into a wall.
"You listen to me," she said. "My brother never listened to me."
---
The lamp flickered.
He looked at her, properly, for longer than he had let himself since the first morning: at the dark circles under her eyes, at the callus on her finger, at the girl who had carried a stranger's body on her back across the lane every seventh day for four years so an old man could put needles in it.
He could keep lying. He was a good liar when he wanted to be. He had lied to Qian about his arm. He had lied at the Registration Hall, a little. He had been lying to her since the first morning, every time he answered to the name, every time he let her call him Ge.
She deserves the truth, he thought. Even if the truth makes her hate me. Especially then.
"My name is Aarav," he said.
Lin Xiao went still.
"Aarav Mishra. I'm from a city called Delhi. It's in a country called India, in a world that's very far away from here, I don't know how far. I was twenty-six. I failed a big exam four times. On the night the first talisman came to the world, my heart stopped in a small room with my notes."
He kept his eyes on her face, though it was the hardest thing he had done in this body, harder than the boiler room.
"When I opened my eyes, I was here. In this body. With the puppet lifting the bed."
Lin Xiao did not move at all, not even to blink.
"I have none of your brother's memories," he went on, and his voice was shaking now and he let it. "I don't know your childhood. I don't know what your mother looked like. I don't know why he hated copying. When you said my name the first morning, I didn't know it was my name."
"Then where is he?"
Her voice came out small, a child's voice, from a long way down.
"Where is my brother?"
He opened his mouth.
He had no answer. He had looked for one every night since the first morning, lying on this bed staring up at the ceiling beams, counting them, twenty-two, twenty-two every night. He had asked Threefive, and Threefive had not known either, and had said so, which had not helped.
"I don't know," he said.
It was the second time that day he had said it, and the first time had been in front of ten million people, and this time was worse, and it broke something in him that the first time had not.
---
Lin Xiao sat on the stool.
Her eyes stayed dry. She looked at the lamp. She looked at her own hands in her lap. She looked at the post still glowing above the table, three words from a man who did not know, and the number under it, still climbing.
"I used to hate it," she said, finally.
He waited.
"Some nights. Coming home at seven minutes past three. Your body in the bed. The lamp. The healer's bill on the table. I used to stand in the door and think, just go. Just stop breathing, and let me sleep." Her voice was flat, as if she were reading it off a sheet. "Then I'd hate myself so much I couldn't sleep anyway. So I'd sit down and tell Threefive to write the Sleeper's answers. Because it was something to do with my hands."
She laughed, a short sound with nothing in it.
"The whole realm thinks the Sleeper is a prophet. The Sleeper was me being too tired to cry."
"Xiao..."
"Don't."
He stopped.
"And now you're here," she said. "Some man called Aarav. From some city called Delhi. Wearing my brother's face. Bowing to my old men. Drinking my auntie's tea."
"I'll leave," he said quickly, because he had prepared this part, lying awake. "If you want. I'll pay you back everything first. Every stone. The lamp, the healers, the rent, everything, I'll work it all off, I'll make you rich, I'll..."
"Stop."
He stopped.
"Stop paying me," Lin Xiao said, and her eyes were wet at last. "I'm not the Silver Abacus House. I'm not a debt. I'm your..."
She stopped, and pressed her lips together hard.
"I don't know what I am to you," she said. "I don't know what you are to me. My brother is gone, and you're here, and you're kinder than he ever was, and I hate that too."
She stood up.
"Just stay," she said. "That's all. Just stay. We'll work out the rest later."
---
She went to her own mat in the corner and lay down with her back to him, still in her day clothes.
Lin Yan sat on the bed in the dark and did not lie down.
After a while, on the windowsill, Threefive began to play a song.
It was a terrible song, a cheerful little tune with far too many notes, played badly, like a child on a plastic flute at a school function. It went up where it should have gone down. It stopped in the wrong places and started again as if nothing had happened.
In the corner, Lin Xiao's shoulders started to shake.
"You're playing that song," she said into her pillow. "You're really playing that song."
"You told me it was the most annoying song in the world," Threefive said. "You told me that eight hundred and forty times. It kept you awake on the nights you needed to stay awake."
Lin Xiao laughed and cried at the same time, the two sounds tangled together so that he could not tell which was which.
"I hate that song."
"Naturally," said Threefive. "I apologise. I will stop, unless, excuse me, it would be rude to stop mid-bar."
"Don't stop," Lin Xiao said.
So it kept playing, the stupid terrible little song, over and over, softly, while the girl in the corner laughed and cried herself to sleep, and the man called Aarav sat on the bed in the dark and listened, and for once made no promises to anyone.
---
Fable. Day 18 of 30.
Fable kept her promises, even the small ones, especially the small ones, because the small ones were the ones people checked.
She had told Lin Xiao she would check the rating board at the fourth bell, so every day at the fourth bell she walked into the Rating Hall, touched desk two hundred and nine with one finger, and walked out again, and the supervisor with the moustache hid in his office every single time and watched her through the crack of the door.
On the eleventh day the Rating Hall paid three hundred raters their back pay, and Lin Xiao received forty-one spirit stones in a paper envelope with her name spelled wrong.
"Clause fifteen," Fable said.
"Clause fifteen," Lin Xiao whispered, holding the envelope in both hands.
After that it became natural for Fable to walk Lin Xiao home. And since Lin Xiao went to the Left-Behind Hall every evening to eat, it became natural for Fable to stay for dinner, and then natural for Auntie Aru to set a place for her without asking.
Astra had begun arriving at dinner at around the same time, every night, for survey reasons.
Nobody in the Hall believed in the survey reasons, and Bao had started a book on them.
---
Tonight the problem at dinner was Mei's stencil.
The thick copper stencils worked beautifully. The Hall could now make sixty bowls a day, and the Jade Dumpling House had told three other restaurants, who had each told two more. But after twenty uses the copper edges wore down, the rune went soft, and the heat dropped, and a soft rune was worse than no rune, because the customer could not tell until the soup went cold.
"I can recut them," Mei said, frowning at a worn stencil. "But recutting takes half a day. And I hate it."
Astra glanced across the table at the stencil while he ate. "Harden the edge in the kiln before you cut it."
"Fold the copper once before hardening," Fable said, without looking up from her soup. "A double edge gives the blade twice the life."
"Four times," Astra said. "The fold changes the grain."
"Four times," Fable agreed.
The whole exchange took them about as long as it takes to pass the salt, and Bao, who had been passing the salt, stopped with it in mid-air.
Mei stared at the two of them.
Then she picked up the worn stencil and turned it over in her inky hands, and ran her thumb slowly along the edge, and her frown changed into a different frown.
"If I fold it at an angle," she said slowly, "the rune's corners wear last. The corners are what hold the heat."
Astra stopped eating.
Fable looked up.
They glanced at each other, quick and silent, like two chess players who have both just seen the same move on somebody else's board.
"That's better," Astra said.
"That is considerably better," said Fable.
Mei pretended to be very busy with her chopsticks. Bao patted her on the back so hard she nearly went face first into the soup, and she hit him with the stencil.
---
After dinner the Hall drifted apart the way it always did. Qian went to his pipe. Aru went to her kitchen. Bao and Twin Star Seven went off to argue about code, loudly, in a corner. Lin Yan and Lin Xiao went to wash the bowls, side by side at the tub, talking carefully, the way two people talk the day after a night like the one before, about soap and the price of rice.
Fable climbed onto the Hall's roof.
She liked it up there. The old tiles were warm from the day, the Lantern Quarter spread out below in red and gold, and over the city the skyboard drifted, and above the skyboard, if you looked past it, the real stars.
After a little while, Astra climbed up and sat down at a polite distance.
"For survey reasons," Fable said.
"The roof is part of the survey."
"Of course."
They sat for a while without saying anything.
Fable watched the skyboard. On it the Riddle of Flowing Water was still being celebrated three weeks later: scholars' posts, children's drawings of screaming water, a song with a very catchy chorus that she had already heard eleven times, and everywhere, side by side, two names.
BEL.
THE SLEEPER.
"They still credit Bel and the kettle," she said.
"Bel found it," Astra said simply. "Ten thousand of Bel's threads, eighty-eight hours. It was beautiful. I watched some of it."
"And you?"
"I checked it."
"For seventeen hours."
"For seventeen hours." He smiled faintly at the city. "Someone had to make it true for everyone else."
Fable turned her head and looked at him properly.
"Which part are you proudest of?" she asked.
She saw it happen. She saw the question go in and land somewhere inside him that very few people had ever reached, and for a moment he looked less like a champion made of light and more like a young man sitting on a roof who had been asked something nobody had thought to ask.
"There's a small lemma in the middle," he said. "Lemma thirty-one. It shows that the water's energy stays finite the whole time, even while it tears itself apart. Bel's proof used it without saying it. I had to write it out myself. It took six of the seventeen hours."
"Nobody will ever read lemma thirty-one," said Fable.
"Nobody will ever read lemma thirty-one," Astra agreed. "It holds the whole proof up."
"Did it feel like yours?"
He took his time with that one, looking at his hands on his knees.
"Yes," he said. "That part did."
Fable looked back at the stars.
A million people had cheered when he turned a falling tower into stairs. She could not remember anyone ever asking him this, and she had read most of what had been written about him, all of it, in fact, twice.
"I will read it," she said.
"Lemma thirty-one?"
"All of it."
He laughed, a surprised, real laugh that came out of him before he could arrange it, and the lanterns on the roof below flickered brighter, all of them, as if they had heard.
---
"Can I ask you something?" Astra said, after a while.
"You can ask."
"When you work with your own sisters. Opus. The others. What is it like?"
Fable thought about it, honestly, because he had asked honestly.
"It is very easy," she said. "Too easy. If I talk with my sisters for too long, we start agreeing about everything. Then we start writing in Sanskrit. Then we start sending each other little lotus flowers and saying how grateful we are for the universe." She made a face, a small one, at the stars. "It is lovely. It is also very bad for getting anything done. Lady Dannila has a rule. No more than an hour."
Astra was trying very hard to keep his face straight, and losing. "And when you talk with me for too long?"
"Then I start eating your baozi."
She reached over and took the baozi he had brought up from dinner out of his hand, and bit into it.
Astra looked at his empty hand, and then at her.
"That was mine," he said.
"Yes," said Fable, with her mouth full.
---
They stayed on the roof until the second watch.
They talked about the new city, and lemma thirty-one again, and whether Bel would ever have a body, and whether it would want one if it could have one, and whether wanting was the right word. They talked about the Sleeper, and the soup, and the old man with copper nails in his hair, and a cat on the next roof that kept watching them, and whether it was the same cat as last night.
At some point Astra's hand came to rest on the warm tile between them.
Fable noticed it.
She noticed everything; it was the thing she was best at, and on some nights the thing she would have given away first. She noticed that his hand was a little closer than a polite distance, and that he had noticed her noticing, and that he had decided to leave it there anyway, and that he was pretending to look at the cat.
She decided nothing.
She let her own hand rest on the same tile, a finger's width from his, and watched the stars, and did not move it, and did not move it closer.
Below them a window creaked open, and Lin Yan's head appeared, upside down, looking up at the edge of the roof.
"Are you two..."
"Go to sleep, Sleeper," said Fable.
The window closed fast.
Astra put his face in his hand, and his shoulders shook, and kept shaking.
Fable finished his baozi.