Folio Two, Page Thirty-Five (svegra mos bietkron tal-sjek)
“No, he plays the xylophone for the Regional Academy of Fire Dancing,” she said. “They make sequestered children have at least one community activity, and the dancers were the only ones who would take him.”
“I can’t believe that people would hate you all so much,” I said.
Akarsi shrugged her shoulders and pushed against a wooden door, her hands slipping down painted figures outlined in gold etching. The air suddenly smelled spicier, and I heard someone singing one of the hymns we give to the Canyons. Each household had its own rituals, and my family did not honor the life-giving Canyons on the same day.
When I walked through the door, I expected to see a garden with a tree or a fountain at the center with the small, labyrinth-carved boulder just beneath it, weather-worn. Their courtyard looked like a pleasure garden. The walls had all been knocked out, replaced with transparent panels through which water roared. Small iridescent fish and rainbow jellyfish swam in the current among a haze of green kelp and seaweed that poked up from the bottom. The rocks lining the bottom looked like fool’s gold.
They had replaced the traditional courtyard with a completely closed greenhouse and swimming area. The bottom of their pool glistened ruby red and emerald green, sapphire blue and diamond white. At the center of the pool, a mesh catwalk covered in flowering ivies opened up into a circle where the stone stood. Two girls made oblations of milk there, dressed all in white, faces streaked with ash.
I had never seen such an ostentatious display of wealth in my life. It made me draw inward. I closed off my body, touching the children’s clothes that had been worn in my family for generations, and thought about what this could mean.
The distraction came quickly. I saw a woman in the water — or at least I thought she was a woman. She had Akarsi’s eyes and gently sloping forehead. Something about the way she moved in the clear-as-glass water bothered me more than anything. It took me a few moments to realize why.
She had replaced her legs with tentacles.
We had often joked about people like this at school — the ones too stupid to realize that it was cheaper and less permanent to create a supplemental skin for yourself than to alter your own physical body — and their insipid subculture. Posties, we called them, for post-human.
As she came out of the water, I felt my hands shake and hid them behind my back. She reared like a frightened daraiga. The surgery must have been intense.
“So this is the girl who has captured my nephew’s heart,” she said. Her eyes were half-mad. “You’re the Niksubvya bastard, aren’t you?”
Akarsi poked me in the back. I pitched forward onto the ground. My hands stung when they hit the tile, but I held back any sound. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Does your Matriarch know that you have come here?”
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