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

“You can’t,” he gasps, “the overseer—”

“If there’s a prohibition against harming you, we’d have been explicitly told, wouldn’t we?” I press my gun against the pulse-point in his throat. “Neither is there a prohibition against you entering the game as a duelist. Anything Wonsul’s Exegesis hasn’t forbidden is fair game, whether that’s you using insider knowledge or deploying a Retribution command on a sub-contest. So? I could kill you. If I’m wrong, well, no one said you can’t murder the archivist. If I’m right, it’s perfectly fantastic to murder another duelist.”

“I haven’t done anything to you.”

“Possibly not,” I agree amicably, though I wouldn’t consider an orbital strike nothing. “But I want to win. How come you didn’t attack the Vimana, out of curiosity?”

“You’re staying there. I—I owed you.”

Ah. Sometimes good deeds indeed go rewarded, and more duelists gathered in Cadenza than are accommodated at the hotel. He must have had only one Retribution to spare. “Appreciate it. How many overrides do you own?”

He swallows, his laryngeal lump bobbing against my gun. “Five.”

“Use one to destroy your regalia. Transfer the rest to me.”

The room’s illumination strobes and flashes. Out of the corner of my eye I see several of the statuettes flowing together, assembling into a figure of feathered torso and antlered head, the face featureless except for two parallel silver mouths.

Glass shatters. Daji crashes through in a hail of windowpane and mortar-dust, her blade leading: its serrated edges as black as superionic ice, its length as red as a star’s nucleus. She pins Ostrich’s regalia with precision, blade-tip entering plumage and armor. I watch this act of penetration, a knife coring a fruit, a lover descending upon her betrothed. Violence is about branding and being branded: you own your opponent and they own you, until the moment that decides who shall rise in supremacy.

Daji wrenches at the enemy regalia’s antlers, her fingers gouging into where its optics must reside. It thrashes. One of its arms detaches and lunges at her; her fox proxy pounces on that, shredding the limb as if it is nothing more than rotten wood and wet paper. Methodically it moves on to the rest of the enemy regalia, teeth bared and darkened by lubricant.

“Your regalia isn’t going to overcome mine,” I say calmly. “From the looks of it I’d even suggest you can give me all of your overrides. No need to squander any to destroy your partner. What’s its name anyway?”

His mouth is a thin pale line. Sweat gathers on his brow and upper lip. “Maugris upon the Lake.”

“Pretty. I’m not familiar with the etymology.” I press the gun a little harder, so that when he breathes his pulse pushes against the muzzle. It’ll leave a bruise. “How long have you been doing this, exploiting your position? Except you’ve never won, have you. No matter how many rounds someone was always your better, and even though you survived—through a deal with the overseer, I’m guessing—you never got your wish.”

Ostrich doesn’t answer.

“It can’t be entry into Shenzhen—all your work here would’ve earned you admission already. So it’s something more. A guaranteed haruspex integration? Revenge against Catania?” Daji is providing me with a visual feed of her battle: she has the upper hand, is toying with her opponent almost. She’s collapsed one of its legs, ribboned one of its arms, and torn off handfuls of feathers that she flings, laughing, into the air. Showing off for my benefit, and the benefit of the audience in Shenzhen. Destroy it, Daji, I tell her. Better to leave Ostrich without options.

Tears well up in his eyes. “Take my overrides.”

They appear in my overlays as a constellation, five stars, five sets of commands. The count of regalia has changed once more—three, now. I let go of Ostrich. He crumples to the ground, though I haven’t inflicted any real damage.

“One last time.” Ostrich is crying in earnest. “There was a man I loved—he’s still on Catania—I wanted to see him one last time. That’s all I wanted.”

Love plucks at the seams of you and undoes it one by one—it can become such an obsession, such sickness. Passion and the poison it secretes. Would you bleed for love, Eurydice once asked me, and I had scoffed. In the end I’m not proof against it, against the foolishness it can impel you to commit. This basal force moves me, now, when it might not even matter anymore and I may never have Eurydice back in any concrete way.

“Sorry about that,” I say at length. “Better luck next round.”

Recadat makes sure, this time.

A bar in Libretto, suffocated by smoke and liquor. The ceiling is low to the point of being claustrophobic; the scuffed floorboards smell like calcified hope. A hiding place, though far from the best. Were she an unarmed duelist, deprived of her regalia, she might have run into the wasteland and found a cave in which to hole up until this is all over.

But she is not that. She lost Gwalchmei and then she was found.

And so she is here, hunting. Old techniques serve her well: keeping to her little corner and eavesdropping on conversations. People will say anything when they think they’re safe, even though there’s no privacy filter here, even though they could be struck down any time. She tries not to think of the pair in the dining orchard. More than their faces she remembers the meal, the aroma of it swallowed by blood. What a waste it was.

No one has prosecuted her, but then no one was ever going to. Strip a world of law and what remains is human nature, peeled back to throbbing nerves and twitching tendons and ravenous guts. Recadat rubs her fingers together and visualizes herself as a thing of long teeth and legs made for loping on all fours. Her lover would hold her leash, a length of black iron joined to a jeweled collar whose radiance sinks muted into her fur.

Thannarat used to call her a tiger.

She raises her head. An older man