Shall Machines Divide the Earth by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (list of e readers txt) 📕

“An extravagant offer.” I gather a handful of her hair and inhale. Still rose and pomegranate, tinged with sangria. A notification blinks in the corner of my vision. The Vimana’s. “Let me get the door.” I unclasp the harness and leave the prosthesis in Daji’s keeping—she raises an eyebrow and murmurs something about remote access. The fox climbs onto my shoulder.

There’s no one at the door; on the floor is a sealed envelope, black striped with gold. The suite’s security feed shows me that no one has been in this part of the corridor. An AI must have made the delivery.

I open the door partway. The fox trots out to retrieve the envelope and returns with the paper in its mouth. Nothing explosive or toxic that I can detect, says Daji. No anti-cybernetic payload, no anything that could harm you. From material composition this appears to be plain paper. Black ink: carbon, solvent, surfactant, the usual.

All the same I put on my gloves before touching the thing. Conventional adhesive. Perfectly good paper, the envelope stiff and the letter within thick and sumptuous. Neat handwriting; Cyrillic script. My overlays translate: Felicitations to the late-coming duelist partnered to the regalia of roses. I am sure you know who I am—my reputation must precede me. Unlike most who join the Court of Divide I have no wish, save to pursue the purest form of conversation: combat. I sense that you have instincts not unlike mine, a connoisseur of the soldier’s ataraxia. Let us meet honestly and test ourselves, duelist against duelist and regalia against regalia. I’ve attached a place and time.

Yours, Ensine Balaskas.

Recadat meets her lover in a dining orchard where pollen glitters like gold and tourmaline, and the air is redolent with frangipani and persimmons. Foliage both true and artificial cups the restaurant in a palm of boughs and canopies, though they don’t entirely mask Cadenza’s hot, muddy stench. Her lover’s table perches on a stretch of obsidian that juts out from the building’s flank, and though there are railings—translucent, barely visible—she feels as she sits down that they’re at the edge of a precipice, a vast plummet. Sixteen floors aboveground and fatal.

Her lover has already started in on their meal. The cut of meat on their plate is so raw that it rests in a puddle of its own death, like fresh kill, and they’re cutting slices so thin and fine that it should not be possible with a table knife. They lift one morsel to their mouth, swallow it whole. The meat is tender, well-marbled, glistening with blood and marinade. Salt, she guesses, and flecks of spice she does not recognize. The dish is as far from Ayothayan cuisine as it can be.

“Have you had a good outing?” They lick a red blot off their full lips. Today they’ve painted their mouth the shade of graphite. “What good fortune that you weren’t there when the arena was struck.”

“Did you do it?”

A small chuckle—it rings the mesh of chimes they wear like sealing talismans around their throat. “You know I didn’t. I would never harm a woman who occupies so much of your thought.”

“She doesn’t—”

They take hold of Recadat’s wrist, a fingernail in duochrome digging into her flesh. Not painful. Enough to interrupt her sentence. “What news from Ayothaya?”

She composes herself. “Another town burned. Someone had the bright idea to try armed resistance. That didn’t go well, the Hellenes outgunned them completely.” And are not prone to leniency. She wishes she could have told the insurgents to choose differently; to coordinate with other efforts, to bear with the state of atrocity. To wait. She wishes she could send secret messages, but Septet is closed to outside networks. The only news she can get from Ayothaya is via Mandate-sanctioned information brokers, coming neither cheap nor fast.

“Detective Thannarat didn’t give you updates?”

“She must have made detours before coming here, to get prepped and armed, to gather everything she’d need for Septet. Her information’s no more recent than mine.”

Her lover spears another slice of meat, this one thicker, the shape of it making her think of a tongue. They eat the morsel immaculately. “Do you really believe that? Does she behave or sound like a patriot?”

Recadat brushes an insect off her sleeve. A gnat. There was an excess of mosquitoes where she came from, and she used to have a phobia as a child that extended to all bugs: the way their bodies could release unseen horrors, pustulent liquid and larvae and egg sacs. Insect promiscuity. Her cheeks itch. “You don’t have to be a patriot to want a home to go back to.”

“It is true that you’ve known her for so long while I don’t know her at all, except through your accounting. My judgment of her character could be incorrect.” They empty their long-stemmed glass in a single draw and still make that look surgical rather than sloppy. “Yet she doesn’t strike me as driven by a sense of home. What you and she have come here to do requires that you’re ready to confront the limits of your mortal coil. My impression, however, is that she has nothing in particular to return to, no piece of Ayothaya she’d die to preserve. What do you think?”

“Of course she does. Everyone has something.” But if pressed, she wouldn’t be able to name any for Thannarat other than Eurydice, and that’s gone. She admired that in her senior partner, that core of absolute independence, unburdened by attachment. No place for softness, no chink in the armor. A force of nature more than a human being.

“A world is so little, Recadat. What matters is passion. That is what propels people to great deeds, to terrible carnage. To hate or love is the true fuel behind human motive. You’ll immolate yourself for it and march forward even as you burn.”

In the link she shares with her lover, images unfold: life-size, so that in her vision their table is suddenly surrounded by a battalion of