Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,116

her timepiece. The timepiece was a thing of beauty: rose gold set with flashing crystals of darker pink. Vayag was tempted to steal it, just to prove she could, but it would have been unprofessional. She had gotten herself into trouble that way during one of her first missions, and she wasn’t going to jeopardize this one now.

The doors opened and light slanted in from the station, softly bright. Vayag followed the woman with the timepiece out, walking fast, but not too fast. She smiled blandly at the firesnake emblem across from her.

She joined the amiable jostling of the crowd. As she passed a newsstand, she cast her gaze over the broadsheets. All the people in the photos were smiling. She didn’t get a close look at the figures and statistics and charts, but the photos—lying by omission—told her all she needed to know.

Turn right. Up the stairs. Emerge into the cloudlight, pale and crisp. Vayag couldn’t help but notice all the reflective surfaces available to her, if only, if only. Polished windows and metal door frames. Lamp posts darkly glossy. The glint of a man’s necklace, a spark of blue from a woman’s earring. The polish of a Meroi policeman’s boots, even.

It was not too late, the book explained to her, as patiently as if it were instructing a child. Vayag could duck into that teahouse, where there was a line. She could bend her head over the book’s pages, fit her finger to the keyhole, open the page and all its possibilities.

But her aim was not another massacre, no matter how much the book wished otherwise.

The book told Vayag, rather sharply, not to be ridiculous. They worked for the resistance, after all. Would freedom be bought with anything less dear than death?

Not here, not now. The words caught in her throat like thorns.

Down the street. No beggars here, either. They were near the heart of Meroi power, and the Meroi despised untidiness. No more festival banners, no more crisscrossing lines of laundry. The children played in designated areas instead of rambling in and out of the alleys. There was a puddle to one side of the street, a remnant of the thunderstorm that had passed by two days ago. More reflections; one of them was Vayag’s own, murky and sullen and distorted by ripples.

Vayag went to a noodle shop and made her order: brown noodles with shrimp, which Kereyag had always loved. She sat at a table next to an ostentatious vase and studied the illegible scratches on the tabletop. The server brought her a glass of cold tea.

Outside, a patrol went by in their red uniforms. She couldn’t hear their footsteps from here, of course, although the rumbling of cars passing was an inconstant.

Vayag had her own timepiece, a shabby student affair that she had bought two days ago in a pawn shop. She made a note of the time: four more minutes. She had cut it too close, counting on the general reliability of the rail system, but done was done.

She wore long Meroi-style socks that went up to mid-calf. Taped to her left sock was a ribbon-shaped transmitter. In four minutes—three and change, really—she would activate it with her other foot, and then the cancelers that had been planted throughout the city would direct a pulse toward the Cloud Fortress. After that, it was up to her to escape if she could, and to die if she couldn’t.

It seemed unlikely that the resistance had a way of disabling the fortress’s defenses, but Vayag wasn’t privy to the details of the plan, and that was as it should be.

Two minutes. She watched another server, this one sallow of face, settle up with a young couple. The clink of coins sounded the same no matter what the mint. The Meroi coil and its derivatives had largely replaced native coins, which had come in a confusing variety of denominations. As a child she had hated memorizing the relative values: twelve pence to a myon, five myon to a rorogu, two rorogu to a half-jirik . . . fortunately, the full jirik had been the largest denomination she had encountered with any regularity. Naturally, once the coins with their annoying conversions were gone, she missed them.

One minute. Vayag sipped her tea. It wasn’t very good tea, brewed too strong, but such details didn’t matter. She felt a slow trickle of sweat in the small of her back.

Her time was up. Vayag twisted slightly and pressed her calf hard against