The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers

From: Issue 4

I see the green and lilac ribbon braided tight and tucked under the brim of your hat. Thanks for the confirmation—you could call it an installment payment. My part of our bargain is this story.

My story begins on a lovely night, one of those clear crisp early-summer evenings where the sun lingers well into working hours but the cool air begs for a silken wrap or a shot of vodka. I got off the tram at the edge of downtown and unbuttoned the top of my coat. Each button was shaped like a round peony bud, and the opening framed the soft skin of my neck. I glanced down, judged the effect good, and traced a squiggle on my tablet to summon a velokab.

A kab came right away, which I thought meant good luck. It was painted with shiny yellow enamel, and the driver, a woman maybe a decade or two older than me, had a bright yellow headscarf to match. I was just about to swing into the seat behind her when she said, “I don’t give rides to bastards.”

“Do I know you?” I was genuinely wondering if I had slighted her somehow. I meet so many people, with so many faces.

“I’m seeing you.” Her gesture took in my sheer tunic, my flowing veil. “You’ll have never known a contract.”

I could hear the traces of her high-mountain accent now, the way she hopped from vowel to vowel without intervening consonants to smooth the introductions. She meant ‘bastard’ literally, that I was a child of one parent, born without a lineage. And the mother of future bastards, presumably. As if—may every face of the green saint witness me—I didn’t know how contraception worked.

I stroked her right hand gently, where it rested on the open dash. “Don’t worry. I would have hired you to drive me for an hour, but I won’t now. You’ll have to find another very short-term contract.”

She stomped on the pedals. Her velokab lurched forward, straight toward a tourist hugging an overstuffed duffel. The tourist dropped their bag. I started to scream. But the velokab’s sensors cut in and jerked sideways, sliding the kab into traffic a hand’s-breadth behind a fat gray truck.

I watched the kab drive away, bobbing and turning through the traffic like a candy wrapper floating down the river. I made myself relax my toes and my fingertips. I thought about breezes on water. But my breath was still knotted up like a Company contract. I had almost stolen somebody’s life, because she hurt my feelings.

You’re shaking your head. You wouldn’t hold me to account. The judges wouldn’t either, no matter how smug they are, in their snow-white wigs. That’s what kab drivers are for: to be responsible. A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.

When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.

The next kab I summoned was driven by my friend Talga, and if I could have jumped over the dash, I would have hugged them. I settled for a heartfelt handclasp and a distracting question: “How’s business?”

They pulled away from the curb with a satisfied little whistle. “All charged up!”

Any city resident gets a power allowance, but it’s not enough to run a kab on, no matter how hard you pedal. If you don’t have a connection to a Company or one of the judges’ charities, you’re stuck paying surge prices. Or, if you’re smart like Talga, you siphon power.

They told me about a lunch counter just on the other side of the river that sold high-mountain food, stacks of pancakes filled with onion and pumpkin and fried in lots of butter. The owner was obsessed with endurance bike racing. He probably made as much from bets as from his pancakes, no matter how crispy they were. The whole back wall of the restaurant was devoted to a race display, with mountain paths molded in real time and toy bikes creeping along. Except cliffs kept popping up, and disappearing. Talga debugged the display, and in return the owner let them park. Their velokab charged while the restaurant was closed.

We drove for a while, past kiosks selling tourist scarves and restaurants with rooftop grills. Many people smiled once at me, but nobody glanced twice. A cold voice in the back of my mind started doing arithmetic about fares and rent.

Talga asked, “How is your situation, really?”

I should have known that they would recognize I was deflecting. “I met a kab driver who hates all twelve thousand of us flowers.”

I would have said more, but near the next corner, music was blaring from a basement teahouse. A woman with a zigzag headscarf leaned against the stairway railing, looking back and forth between her tablet and the sky. I asked Talga to go a little slower.

“Saved by a prospect, huh, Rauzanet?” But they brushed their hand along the dash, and the kab obeyed.

The woman’s jacket looked like Company issue: it was short and severe, except for the brightly embroidered patch over her heart. The orbital station would be visible beyond the skyscrapers, despite our light pollution, so maybe she was watching for it. Or maybe she was afraid a piece of skyscraper would fall on her. She had the twitchy look and slightly hunched shoulders of someone who spends a lot of time underground, or watching underground cameras. A miner, or a mining engineer. Either way, a likely customer.

I tapped the long handle of my fan against the edge of the kab door, metal ringing against metal. The woman glanced up. I held her gaze for a long moment, smiling like we shared a tiny, private joke, and then shook my head and let my gauzy veil fall across part of my face. Traffic was moving again, but Talga swung the kab round the corner without me having to ask. The trefoil vine charm above their head swung wildly.

Talga’s tablet chimed with a shared-ride request before we were halfway around the block. I laughed. Slow night, yeah, but I was still a star. Because here’s the thing. The back of a velokab can fit two living creatures, if one of them is a sixteen-year-old in the throes of first love, or a kitten. If you’re old enough to form a binding contract and you’re requesting a shared ride, you’re not looking to save a couple of coins, you’re looking for someone like me.

Once we were back on the teahouse corner, I set my fan on the seat—it had suggestive illustrations—and swung the kab door open. The woman took my hand and helped me alight. I felt like a khanym’s mistress alighting from a star-ferry, in some ancient tale.

She kept holding my hand as she said, “Will you tell me, are you part of a larger firm?”

That was not only auspicious, but interesting. Most people are anxious about the price of my services—but this woman was asking about privacy.

I told her, “I am a sole proprietor,” and watched her shoulders relax. “I even have a data security expert on retainer.” My security expert is also my girlfriend, but that was more information than she wanted.

“It sounds like an impressive operation!” Her thumb traced the base of my thumb, tentative.

I shook my head with a tiny bit of self-deprecation, letting my veil slip back from my face, and knew by the skip in her breathing that our deal was complete.

My new client fired off a message to her friends, who were still drinking in the teahouse. Then I packed her into the velokab, promising Talga would look after her. They smiled. It was their smile for guests and customers, lower lip hiding the edges of their teeth, but it was genuine, for all of that. As the kab pulled away, I heard them asking my client whether she was in a traditional field, such as nephrite or diamonds, or did she source materials for the station? Either way, Talga would welcome her and tell her stories about the city. They would also make sure she didn’t find another amusement, between the teahouse and my workspace: if you weren’t careful, sometimes clients wandered off for another drink. I waved a cheerful, temporary goodbye, and caught the next velokab.

We pulled up by the old terraced house that held my workspace a minute or so behind Talga and my client. Sometimes I brought clients in through the lift around back, but this time I unlocked the door with the charm on my bracelet and led her up the narrow stairs. I glanced back once. Her eyes were wide and dark, wider even than you’d expect in the dim passageway.

I was proud of my workspace. A screen covered one wall with shifting golden tracery, sometimes a network of neurons, sometimes a network between stars. Light fanned out above the bed, with its rich blue coverlet. Talga had helped me with the wiring. A shorter lamp sat on a table, beside the low couch and the samovar ready with tea.

I drew my client inside and kissed her, fiercely, like I was the one who was hungry, like I was a ship and she was the gateway to the Deep. She laughed in the back of her throat and held me close, shivering a little with the tightness of her grip. But a minute later she asked, “Is there a contract? I don’t—I haven’t done this before.”

Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had, but didn’t want to believe this was a habit. It wasn’t my business. I guided her to the couch instead, and offered her tea or vodka. She chose tea. I poured vodka for myself, in a tiny crystal glass. This was a double strategy: to make her feel relaxed, as if we were continuing the teahouse party together, and to make her a little guilty for not matching me toast for toast. It’s always useful, when a client thinks they owe you something extra.

The contract was on a handheld screen, a nice one, its back embossed with diamond tiles. My default term was two hours. The client promised not to disparage my services or seek information about my other clients. I promised confidentiality, in the old language: I will not communicate what I know or guess about your bindings, in speech, writing, or by gesture, to any being living or emulating life, so long as our own lives endure.

The signature page was a mirror. My client looked at it, still wide-eyed, and seeming more so from the lightness of her brows. The screen collapsed her face to an impenetrable hash, a dappled pattern of shadow and light. I gave it my own face in turn. Then I took her hand, and we went toward the bed.

Our first motions were rushed, her fingers on my nipple, her leg trapped between mine as she rocked against my hand. It was only after all the tension was shaken out of her, in a series of half-laughing warbling cries, that she ran her fingers through my hair. The strands slipped freely. There was just one narrow, heavier braid weighted by my Aid Collective ribbon, reflective tape backed by midnight blue. Meanwhile, my client had lost a hairpin somewhere. Her zigzag-patterned scarf was pushed back, and the plain kerchief underneath was slipping, showing the braids at her temple. I liberated the remaining pins. She made a little huffing sound, the kind of noise you make when you’re working up the nerve to do something frightening, and pulled both scarves off.

I kissed her temple and her eyelids, letting her feel the protection of our bargain, letting her grow calm. “It has been a long time?”

“Half a year, on this assignment. Another half-year, before I can go home.”

She was married, of course. I had guessed that from her age and her Company insignia, and known it the moment her kerchief slipped, showing a flicker of yellow. She had the brilliant purple cords of an Amaranth Company employee, too. She was only an employee, not a shareholder. A shareholder wouldn’t have had to spend a year away from her children, and I saw the copper ribbons for two children, braided at the nape of her neck.

There was another ribbon I didn’t recognize, a jaunty spiral of lilac and green twisting above her right ear. She could push back her scarf with one hand and display that promise, the way you did. I had learned more about her; I’d seen all her obligations. But then, she knew I was bound, despite my lack of braids. As long as our own lives endured.

I wouldn’t be telling you this story, if it wasn’t for that clause.

I held her, and we talked. Not about anything close to her heart, or at least, nothing that seemed so at the time. More about colors of jade. It was a light shade that was most valuable, a kind that seemed thick and soft, like wax. Like the fat from cardamom pastries, she told me. It seemed like, if you wrapped the jade pieces up in paper, it would turn translucent. The miners sent mechanical snakes into the ground hunting jade, snakes with bright lamps and teeth sharp with cheap factory diamond. Their tails dragged the network cable that told them where and how to hunt. But the snakes’ eyes caked with grit, and the cable snagged and broke, and the Company wouldn’t fund replacements or improvements, not for an engineer who didn’t own a single share. So it was personal money or personal time, stretching all your attention underground, till you forgot who you were or what bound you to the surface.

“You could be eight repeaters,” she told me, “or twelve lamps.”

I laid a sharp line of kisses from the base of her ear to the base of her neck, and asked her to interpret the signal, and then we were done talking for a while.

I saw my client back to Talga’s kab, when her contracted time was up, and then took a moment to straighten my workspace and rearrange my veil. I was just thinking about going out again when my tablet chimed with her tip. It was a tidy sum. Four lamps, by her exchange rate, or a string of jade beads, gleaming like drops of oil. I didn’t think I could do better, with the late crowd. I debated for a few minutes. At last I shrugged, changed into my off-duty scarf, and caught the second-to-the-last tram back to my girlfriend’s place. Khoshet was already asleep when I arrived, twirled up in the quilts like a boy in his first turban. I liberated one corner, and curled around her, and fell fast asleep.

— # —

I woke to the sound of my tablet buzzing on the floor beside the mattress. A burst of vibration, and then silence, and then another burst. I didn’t understand why the room was still dark. Calls shouldn’t come through, if the room was still dark. I stabbed at the tablet, and keyed, “Who?”

I saw Talga’s icon, the triple vine, and the insistent pulse of their demand for a voice call.

I wrapped myself in a quilt and took the call on the other side of the room, by the kitchen nook. I wasn’t offering visuals, but Talga was. There were a couple of beetle-sized lights beside them, but the main illumination came from their screen. Their cheek was scraped, and their turban was askew. I couldn’t see their kab.

“I’m out back, by your lift. I need you to let me in.”

“Talga, I’m at Khoshet’s.”

They shook their head. This was one fact too many. “So bring her. Rauzanet, please. I’ll be all right. I just—I just need a cup of tea.”

They were lying. I didn’t know how or why or who had hurt their face, but they were exhausted. Tendrils of dark hair fell across their forehead, where their turban was slipping. “We’ll be right there.”

In the end, it took a quarter of an hour for me to drag Khoshet into consciousness, and another half-hour for us to walk over, with the tram lines quiet. Talga’s kab wasn’t parked out front, and I wondered at first if they had gone somewhere else, but when we walked around the building they were there, slumped back against the wall like they had gone to sleep standing up. Their left sleeve was ripped, and the mark on their face was blood.

“What happened?” Khoshet asked.

Talga shoved themself off the wall and took a step, grimacing. “I was afraid, if I sat down, I wouldn’t be able to stand back up.”

We took them up the lift, their arm over my shoulder, and put a blanket around them. I washed their face and brushed them off. Their clothes and turban were covered with fibrous splinters. Meanwhile, Khoshet made tea with extra sugar.

Talga stared at their glass as if they’d forgotten how to drink. “I saved these.” They fished in their breast pocket and produced two objects. One was the threefold vine charm, from above their dash. The other was a flat gray cone, about the size of my thumbnail.

“Fucking thorns. Your license.”

Talga giggled at me, in that high bleak way that’s the other side of crying, and clutched the blanket around themself, and finally managed, “Yes.”

The kab license was inside the charm. Oh, sure, it looked fragile. And this one was in the image of an icon for the Saint of Vines. But all the data was inside: the registration, Talga’s right to pick up passengers, and all the images collected over the last year of sudden turns and shifts and stops. You would need clippers that could cut through diamond, to retrieve that charm when the kab was running. If Talga had it in their pocket, then their velokab was wrecked, and with it their livelihood. The gray cone looked like a sensor, but I didn’t know where it was from.

I nudged the sugar bowl toward Talga, willing them to drink. Instead, they stared at me, clutching my deep blue throw in both fists. “She’s dead.”

“Who is?” But I could already feel the sadness stuck inside my chest, like a glass of tea too hot to finish swallowing, gulped too deep to spit out. Talga meant my client, the one who went drinking without filling in her eyebrows first, and told stories about snakes with diamond teeth. The one with copper ribbons for two children whose names I didn’t know. Whose own name I didn’t know. All I had was an account number, and the dappled pattern to encapsulate her face. That wouldn’t matter, in the ordinary course of things. But in the ordinary course of things, my clients don’t wind up dead.

Talga blinked slowly and finally sipped their tea. “There should be a recording of the bad parts, on the charm for the saint.” They were slipping into their childhood voice, with the overly precise forms of an unwanted Company kid, drilled by tutors on some other continent.

“I’ve got it.” Khoshet unfolded her notebook and coaxed it to interface with the charm, making soft shushing noises.

The recording opened on a long block flanked by skyscrapers. A delivery van was parked half on the pedestrian walkway and half on the street. We saw the flash of a logo, white catkins hanging from a branch, and then the van broke open. The back gate fell down, and the side walls too, crashing flat like toppled gaming tiles.

My client said something. Maybe “Shit.” The recording wasn’t optimized for sound.

“That’s ‘Trigger’,” Talga whispered. On the recording, they dragged their shoulders into a desperate swerve. The van was too close, even with the kab’s reflexes. The metal wall slammed onto the canopy. The kab spun and smashed. We heard a long, drawn-out crunch as the velokab’s struts and bars crumpled around Talga. The kab frame was designed to take the force of a crash, and protect the passengers.

But the passenger had been thrown free. She lay half in the street and half on the far walkway. Talga moved toward her. In the charm’s now-skewed perspective, they were all legs and shadow.

“Her scarf was still in place, Rauzanet. Her head was flopping, and I knew it wouldn’t matter if I moved her, she was gone. But her scarf was perfect.”

“I pinned it up for her.” I bumped shoulders with Khoshet, to feel her presence. On her notebook screen, the recording cut to black.

Talga pressed their fists against their eyes. “I thought I could at least get the ramps out of the street, keep someone else from running over them, but the panels were locked open. I found that little gray cone while I was scrabbling for a hold.”

Khoshet poked at it. The base still bore the marks of dried adhesive.

“Then I started walking. I didn’t want my face to show up on a tram monitor.” Or maybe they couldn’t bear the thought of getting into another kab. Talga told us about the hike, out of downtown and over the bridges. The few people they passed looked the other way. They felt their feet puff up with blisters, and the blisters burst. Their recitation trailed off here.

“Talga, will a hunter be looking for you?” Khoshet spoke gently, but she was mapping out the danger. Legally, Talga was at fault. That’s why kabs have drivers, right? A human has to be at fault, when somebody is killed.

Talga spread their hands in uncertainty. “Maybe? Our customer, was she married?”

I nearly snapped at Talga for their rudeness, and then I remembered she was dead. “She was married, and they had children.” I was still working through the ramifications. “But she took a year-long contract here, without them. I don’t think they can afford a hunter.”

Talga was still trying to be logical. “What about Amaranth Company? She was Amaranth, right?”

A Company could certainly pay. I winced and offered them a hand as anchor.

“Amaranth won’t investigate.”

We both looked at Khoshet.

She spun her tablet and showed us two images. The first was as she had reconstructed it from Talga’s footage: those white catkins against a black circle, painted on the side of the van, a little scuffed. The second was the logo of an Amaranth subsidiary, the same circle and catkins, with the subsidiary’s name in flowing script. “So you’re safe. The only people who could pay a hunter, won’t.”

Talga’s grip on my hand loosened for a moment. Then they clasped it tighter, as if they were just becoming conscious of the touch. “That cone I found. It’s a sensor, isn’t it?”

“Saying when to drop the doors?” Khoshet sketched a quick, calligraphic command on her notebook’s input page, then jerked her head in bitter confirmation. “It’s keyed to a Company code.”

Talga offered, “She had an Amaranth jacket.” A radio tag could easily have hidden underneath the embroidered purple spikes.

The sadness I had swallowed was spreading through my chest, splitting into tight-curled filaments of rage. The Companies didn’t want Talga. Just an unplanned kid, born outside a contract. But they had worked so hard to make their own place. They learned the city, they saved up to buy the velokab, they kept it charged. Now Amaranth had killed my client for reasons I didn’t understand—it had to be the Company, she didn’t know anyone else on this continent. The Company would have murdered Talga, too, by accident. Or not even by accident. As insurance. Talga was the explanation for any judge or hunter who actually came looking.

Khoshet was rummaging in my supply cupboard, fulfilling the need to do something, anything. She found two more teacups and a bowl of apricot candies. I took one, because Talga needed to eat, so it was with the sour-sweet of the coming summer on my tongue that I said, “I’m going to find them. The Company person who did this.”

Khoshet laughed in startlement. It was too much, too huge. Talga shook their head. I shifted all my attention into coaxing them to sleep.

— # —

The next day I dressed carefully, choosing a veil a shade heavier than usual, but a filmier tunic. I got to the teahouse around the time clerks and managers finish their work days. There was a long counter along one wall, with sesame pastries and hashish candy under glass, tea from three different continents, and different sizes of trays for sharing. It was a pretty display, though most of the profit would come from vodka.

I looked for the person working. Not the people in matching aprons behind the counter, but one of the twelve thousand flowers, like me. Most tourist teahouses have someone resident. In this case, it was a man with a close-trimmed beard and a casually unbuttoned shirt who went by Esarik. His heavy scent was a mix of teak and orange blossoms.

I asked Esarik to sit with me and play a game of narda. Narda boards are long and skinny, with peaked triangles along the sides. The red counters are Sun employees, the black counters work for the Deep, and you can’t clear a counter and score its points until it earns a Company share. You can tell who invented this game, and they weren’t a soldier or a judge. But narda is still a staple of my trade, because it’s contemplative enough to let you watch a crowd, but you can bet on the dice rolls if you want to. Esarik was happy to play. Of course, I was tipping him generously for the privilege. Otherwise, he couldn’t have justified letting me share.

I waited a while, through the after-work rush and the suppertime lull. Esarik took one client upstairs.

This teahouse got a lot of Company workers. That wasn’t a surprise, in one sense; they tend to move in clumps. But usually the different Companies quarrel. My attention was caught by a group of people who had shoved several couches close together. They were mixed in age and in affiliation. One young man had the fluffy beard of someone growing it out for the first time, and a green Cypress hat. A man in gold and black watched the door, soft lamplight half-smoothing the pouches under his eyes. And there was a woman with strong, lined hands and an Amaranth badge on her shoulder, raising her glass in a toast. The others echoed, “Solidarity.”

A burly man wearing a shirt with pearly buttons joined the group, shrugging in a dramatic apology. The man who had been watching the door said something, and the burly man turned the side of his head toward him, rolling up the soft edge of the cap over his ear.

I remembered the lilac and green ribbon under the edge of my client’s scarf. This was her group, I was certain. I smiled at the burly man, who grinned back with the air of a man who has made a budget and is sticking to it.

The group was arguing about something—how to decide when new members could start wearing its braid, I guessed—but it was too amorphous and unwieldy to make real decisions. That happened in pairs and threes, when people got up to choose pastries together, or waited in line for the toilets, or went outside to get a breath of air. The man with the heavy eyes was still watching the door. He seemed a little disconcerted, but not sad. I wondered who had found my client’s body, and who they told.

Eventually the group broke up. The younger crowd went to find a cafe that had water-pipes, and the older crowd went back to their hotel rooms, and ostensibly to bed. The man with the fluffy beard went back to his hotel room, too, and I went with him. There were two people’s clothes strewn everywhere, fancy coats and workout gear, but his roommate was off smoking water-pipes. He was energetic and curious: we tried the bed and the shower.

I was halfway dressed again and trying to blot my hair dry when he tugged on my Aid Collective ribbon. “It’s shiny. Like a river.”

“A mirror for the deep pools of my eyes? It’s for the Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers.”

He laughed. “Surprise! I know what you do now!”

“Brilliant! Simply brilliant deductions!” I rested my damp head on his shoulder. “But you missed the ‘association’ part. Any businessperson has bad days. When you’re sick, or exhausted. Or if you’re much too energetic, and want the fees for an anatomy class. We all chip in, and the Association is there when we need it.”

“No, that really is brilliant. You’ve reinvented collective aid. It’s an ancient philosophy, from before the saint’s wars—I’ve got a book somewhere—” He rummaged in the pile beside the bed. I bit my tongue, and didn’t list any of the philosophers I have read.

The book, when he unearthed it, was a slim volume, printed on the kind of machine that extrudes its own paper, with stars and underlining from at least three different people. He pressed it on me. I didn’t even have to fake my gratitude: it was a manual for forming Aid Collectives. Jade miners from all the Companies were cooperating. No wonder Amaranth was worried.

— # —

I was back at the teahouse the next evening, and so was your miners’ collective. It was a slightly smaller group this time—the burly man and my friend with the fluffy beard were both absent—and the mood was bitter. They were eating sliced sausages and pickled carrots, and remembering disasters: a cave-in, a hand crushed, an ordinary infection that a medic should have caught. They listed names of friends lost, and for every one there was a toast.

Esarik nudged me and said quietly, “She’s drinking water.”

He meant the woman I had first seen toasting, the one with the lined hands and the sharp Amaranth flowers splashed across her jacket sleeve. There’s no shame in answering a toast with fruit juice or chilled tea. But this woman was drinking clear liquid in small glasses, just like all the other collective members. Indeed, she was organizing the toasts: she fetched tray after tray of them, in glasses half the colors of the rainbow. She always took the yellow glass. She probably claimed it was a lucky color.

She noticed me watching the group and smiled, a slow and measured smile. She had surprisingly lovely lashes, thick and soft against her weather-roughened face.

When the party broke up, she walked to our table and said, “I think I have found a friend,” in a voice a little too loud.

Esarik said, “Perhaps two friends,” meaning that he would distract her if I wanted a safer client. I smiled, slid the dice toward him, and thanked him for the game.

The Amaranth woman and I walked out of the teahouse hand in hand, as if we were not new friends but old ones reunited. When we were back at street level she kissed me up against the railing, pushing my tunic up past my waist. Enthusiasm, maybe, or maybe a test: there are certain lines a hunter will not cross. I tipped my head back and kissed her deep.

My tablet chimed, with a notification Khoshet had set up. It meant that somebody was trying to break in.

I was breathing too fast, but that might look professional. I ran my hand down my new client’s back and asked if she had a hotel room.

She laughed, “A surety!” and checked her own tablet, in the casual way of someone wondering about the time.

Mine chimed again, with the notification for, “I am providing data from a false identity.”

She set her arm around my waist and took me to a hotel. It was the same hotel my friend with the fluffy beard had frequented, but she was on the thirty-fifth floor, instead of the tenth. The center of the room was taken up by a vast circular carpet with the hotel’s logo, in gold on red.

My new client traced her fingers along the edge of my veil and down my jawline and nibbled on my lips. Her hands were strong, on my face and holding to my shoulder. I would have rested on them and ignored the coming morning, with any other client.

When she hit a switch on the wall, the carpet shivered into slices and curled away, and a bed rose from the center, piled with golden pillows. I parted my lips in admiration, set my lips to her ear, and asked about the contract.

We sank onto the golden bed together, and she gave me her face. My tablet displayed the hash, black and white dull behind the city lights, but I kept a true image, too. I won’t tell you about the ribbons braided in her hair. I swore confidentiality, and I keep my promises. But I can tell you that when I lifted the crisp kerchief from her hair, a twist of lilac and green ribbon fell away in my hand.

If you seek justice for your friend in the Collective—if you can believe one of twelve thousand flowers—the agent you’re looking for has this face.

© 2021 Ursula Whitcher

From: Issue 4

About the Author

Ursula Whitcher lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with one spouse, two cats, and many enthusiasms, including the history of names, the shape of unobserved dimensions, and very strong black coffee. Ursula’s writing may be found in venues including Liminality, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, and Goblin Fruit, or by following the links at https://yarntheory.net.