Every Thursday, the Inhuman Resources Department shuffles in to remove the hated printer and replace it with one that is, in some unique and specific way, worse. The test page is a ritual of dread.
“It can’t be as bad,” says Pippa, “as the invisible ink cartridge.”
“Or the two-in-one, with the crosscut shredder–”
“It doesn’t print capital letters,” says Railyn, examining the results in slow horror.
“HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO MAKE MEETING TRANSCRIPTS?” frets GLARTH.
“What kind of idiots wouldn’t test that?” Railyn shrieks.
“Idiots? Please,” says Pippa. “Only a genius could only produce such fresh hells.”
Juno’s family would most likely be cool if they were to unearth her habit; they’re neither pious nor hypocritical, and anyway, they like her. Mom would want assurances of her health and safety. Frewin might recommend a counselor.
But addiction runs sweetest on the engine of shame.
Thus secrecy, careful systems, the constriction of her heart when someone’s been poking around her room. It’s only when she knows the house is asleep or empty that she can bring out her box, her relics and the little black hagiograph.
Veneration is ecstasy. Juno surrenders to glossolalia, pillow bunched hard against her mouth.
Only men can join the Guild of Tailors. Only women can be Mechanists, and to trade their secrets is ugly death. When Swan binds her breasts and queues her hair each morning, and when her sister Fei-Li helps with the Automated Seamstress by night, they are playing with knives.
Most people can handle two blades. It’s juggling three that gets you cut.
Lon Lao is sharp and always laughing; Swan keeps him close, as one does with rivals. She worries when she feels his following eyes as they part at dusk.
Fei-Li’s eyes in the window follow him back.
The band is called Tristram Coffin for cool reasons and there are five people in it: Derrick sings and plays drums, Judah and Chareth trade lead and rhythm, Wade has a fretless bass and Katie plays keyboards. Everybody sings backup too, even Judah, who sort of shouldn’t.
People seem to like them but there’s this fog of pervasive worry, among eighty percent of Tristram Coffin, that the only reason they keep coming to shows is because of Katie, and also she’s Derrick’s sister, so the unspoken and iron rule is this: NO DATING KATIE.
Which never causes any drama! The end!
Eventually there are so many of the dead that Karaaz has to start animating some corpses to bury the others. They aren’t good at it. They dig with determination but little forethought, and once they hit six feet they just amble back and forth between the walls.
Karaaz surveys them with a parent’s weary resignation. The wards of her purgatorium need checking and she hasn’t seen a carrier crow in months. Is this how unlife works, an endless accretion of concerns until one day your phylactery falls off a shelf?
Bump, go the dead in their self-made prisons. Bump bump.
Bach put some of the notes in just for dogs and others for aliens, so when the Centauris show up with an old probe in tow and demand proof that it’s really human music, the rehearsals are a bit panicked. Lily’s orchestra has done command performances before, but not for enigmatic states of plasma with gravity rays in high orbit.
Some genius rigged them a “quantasonic resonance deviation heuristic” that will, purportedly, flash red if they go off-hyperkey. Lily’s going to ignore it. Human music. You want it, you got it, she thinks, and tunes up to tension of contact.