one: fancy meeting you here.

"I think he's going to be well. No broken bones," a lilting female voice said.
My eyes opened, and I saw blue with white blurs. I tried moving my head. A young woman with dark hair and dark eyes, dressed in a green silk shirt and long paisley skirt and block sandals stood above me, flanked by two condottieri in rusted armor, tattered khaki uniforms and red capes.
"How did I get here?" I remember stepping off of the train, but before that, nothing.
One of the condottieri spoke. "We were walking by when we found you unconscious. Adela is an experienced healer. She was able to nurse you back to health. We were going to take you to the hospital, but the City Guard and a bunch of condottieri factions mutinied and, well, I shouldn't talk about that."
"I'll say this," Adela said. "We do not belong here."
The Great Library is public. Provided you're ethnically Selinian. They're lucky when they can get a few books outside. They used to allow non-Selinians to come, provided they paid a rather large fee to get in, too much for many people to consider worth something. I got up and went inside, a marble floor covered in a carpet of thick moss and fungus, and a stained glass window depicting a man in a green djellaba, holding a blade pointed downwards, men and women and white flowers at his feet, all of them with an aureole of light around their heads. The books were mostly unreadable, due to moisture or the fact that people have been using the paper inside to start fires. Most of them used the script used in Vaishali anyway, and since very few of the people allowed in were willing to learn, nobody really touched them. The electronic catalogues were broken. There was nothing here for me except for shelter.

I wandered through the small garden in the center of the square, now overgrown, the fountains slick with algae and a breeding ground for mosquitos and leeches. There were only a few ghouls with blood dripping from their mouths and smeared on their flat faces, and a dead Praetorian Guard, stripped of weapons and armor, naked except for his crested helmet, eviscerated from the heart to the genitals, his innards spilled out in a bloody trail, hanging from a jacaranda tree. Carved into the trunk was a message in Vulgata, "We will give up this enclave rather than resort to cannibalism. We do not belong here. Vaishali is not our city to rule over. Victory to the Resistance. Victory to the people of Vaishali. Victory to the People's Liberation Army." There was a pool of dried blood on the floor; one of the guard's feet had been eaten off. A ghoul eyed me hungrily, and hissed at me, spitting blood. I snarled at it, baring my teeth. I imagined I looked rather foolish doing so, but it worked. The ghoul left on all fours, running as fast as its long, spindly legs would take it.

I hurried down the stairs. The hallway was vacant concrete, stripped of decorations, with a few messages painted on the walls and some chewing gum that has lost its color long ago replacing it. "Victory to the Vaishalian Resistance" was most popular. I heard the sound of a fan. At the end of the tunnel was a large room with more stairs and a broken escalator leading down. Once there was a toll, but the glass on the booth was smashed recently and some looters took everything there, not that money means anything now. Parts of the gates were twisted and rusted. I walked through, figuring that nobody would care.
"Don't run away again," a voice said, calm and soft.
It was crowded at the platform. The floor was made of cream-colored hexagonal tiles. Carved stone pillars held up the ceiling. The walls were concrete and decorated with all sorts of obscene and anti-Selinia slogans. Plywood covered up the walls, and wires were exposed where they were missing.
"Fancy meeting you here. Do you, umm, do you remember me?" a familiar-looking, and apparently familiar, woman said. She had ginger hair tied back in two knobs, expressive and warm and almost feral brown eyes dotted with a few freckles, wore a sleeveless yellow tunic with black writing, perhaps a slogan or statement, perhaps the name of a location, in an unfamiliar script, jeans, and sandals. Her nails were painted teal and blue and silver. Each ear held five rings, and she had a set of necklaces, one made of beads, another of cowrie shells, and a thin gold chain with an inverted cross at the end, half obscured under her tunic, with a simple brass key dangling on each side of it. A bracelet of copper and iron, with jade, lapis lazuli, and opal, was around one wrist, two colorful plastic ones around the other.
"Huh? Who are you?" I asked.
"Marciana. Don't you remember? Please tell me you do. Oh, how I wish I could relive those summers."
"I do. Uh, I think. I'm sorry, I've been suffering from amnesia lately, and you haven't sent me any photographs in well over a year, if you did at all. I don't even know why I'm here. I was on a train arriving through the Gate of the Sun."
"I see," she frowned, and looked over towards a young man playing the tambura. "Do you like the music? It's the one vestige of Vaishalian culture that people here can hear. I don't understand why anyone would come to Vaishali so they can live their whole life without ever interacting with a Saindavan. And all they do is complain about the humidity. It utterly defines what I thought a colony would be like. Here, you have about, I don't know, two hundred thousand people living in this bubble. No sense whatsoever, I'm telling you. Gedrosia, the colonists live on plantations, get a monopoly in the Colonial Legislature and pass laws that keep the locals in nowhere jobs with crap wages because they're convinced Gedrosians are only on this planet to cater to their every whim. Salomea makes a controversial attempt to castrate the legislature if something's not done, and is met with fierce opposition. At least they'll be cut off completely if they keep antagonizing the Senate. And then you have Gera and Ouaddai, where Selinians move in so they never have to see rain in their lives, make laws forcing the locals to take housekeeping jobs for crap wages, while they lavish themselves with all the water for golf courses and swimming pools. They aren't content with Nicopolis because it needs to reflect Man's dominance over Nature or some crap like that."

"I know what you mean. I've been stuck here since the siege began. It's too bad the concept of public orchards and individually-grown food is anathema. Where are you coming from?"
"The south. That's all I know. Maybe Kish or Dholavira or Umma. Or one of the colonies."
"Oh. I can't see what you would be doing in Kish. It's been a ruin for seven years. Unless you've been doing research on the long-term effects of The Event, as it's been dubbed. What are your thoughts on that? I think Selinia is covering something up. None of the research on it makes it to the public. I was spending the last six months at the University of Sarnath, you know, east until you reach the Archipelago, and then go north to the mountains, into Champassak. I got out for the summer a month ago. They have such a fascinating culture here. I'd rather we didn't keep ourselves so secluded from it. I wish I could come back to see the Festival of the Lamps in White Dew, um, end of summer. Here's the last place this hemisphere where that calendar makes sense. Ok, not really, since it never snows here."
"I know what you mean."

The train arrived. and we got on. Many of the seats were gone, and the ones that were had colonies of mushrooms growing on the padding, so we stood.
"You've been outside?" Marciana asked me.
"Not since the siege began, and even then, it was an Selinians Only road through the Gate of the Sun. I don't even know if the Gate of the Moon is still open. What's going on?"
"I have no idea, but I think the Exarch's soldiers are winning. The Vaishalians simply don't have the firepower to destroy us, but our supplies are slowly dwindling and Theodosius is just too proud to let them have it. I heard whispers that Ahriman came here from Hindana, and the enclave will fall."
"What's Sarnath like?"
"Nice. It's gorgeous there. There are bridges over the mist connecting different parts of the city. Despite everything, it's still more progressive than Selinia. And the food is quite possibly the ghastliest thing I've ever eaten. I was staying in Sarnath on an exchange program. I wasn't just visiting. My parents pay for it. I'm normally at the university in Nicopolis."
"So, where do their sympathies lie?"
"Most of them want to be left to themselves, although they're willing to be with the Council. There are problems with both Selinia and Champassak, but things never get as bad as they do closer to the border with Champassak proper."
A man with shaggy hair was passing out leaflets for White Orchids to other passengers. Marciana took two, and gave one to me. It was about the laws that affected Vaishalians outside of the enclave. No Vaishalians out after sundown. All food outside of personal gardens must be given to a licensed Selinian distributor. Complete control of education and health care is given to ethnic Selinians. No Vaishalians may hold office or vote in Selinian elections. Vaishalians within the enclave can only hold menial jobs. THE MINISTRY OF THE TWELVE WISE ONES WAS AIDED BY SELINIA.
All sections of the leaflet went into detail on the harsh laws and low quality of health care and education.
"He's taking a big risk when distributing this stuff. He could be executed as a collaborator."

"The city's loss is inevitable," Exarch Theodosius said, looking out the great window of his office on to a vista of red-tiled roofs and tiled domes, pillars of black smoke burning amongst the godowns. Theodosius and his aides wore black formal attire with colorful medals and insignia despite the heat and humidity outside.
"Execute all prisoners," one of the advisors said.
"We do not want to make martyrs out of them. They shall remain in jail," another advisor offered his opinion.
"And when freed by their comrades outside, they will join partisan groups and harass us as we retreat," the hawkish advisor retorted.
"Dispose of them in secret, if you want them dead so much. No trial, no public execution, no parading the dead through the streets," Theodosius said.
"I suggest retaliatory strikes on sacred sites, sir."
"A misguided effort."

"As for the insurrection..." Theodosius sat down in his cushioned wicker chair. His office was airy and all in pastels and off whites, decorated with fern trees and decorative scimitars on the plaster walls.
"There are many disagreeing factions. The PLA, MTWO, the religious fanatics, and the warlords will tear each other apart. We have nothing to worry about. They may take the city, but we can still retreat for now and take it back when we receive new weapons."
"Ahriman's army will reach the city within days, sir."
"His goal?"
"Possibly to take advantage of the situation and push further into the Horn."
"And yet no aid from Selinia at all."
"As we speak, sir, artillery is being shipped out from Vengi, as Exarch Tarcisius believes that Ahriman will focus his attack here, and after the evacuation of Madurai, all cataphracts and clibinarii will be sent here."

Marciana took me to her temporary home, an apartment in a once-aristocratic district that she was renting out near the park, her bedroom furnished with a cot and pile of cushions, bags of clean clothes, and dirty clothes strewn on the floor and hanging on wires outside the window, her living room with a table and chair, a desk with a stack of books and a bowl of strawberry incense, a worn carpet. The architecture I could see from the window was exquisite, yet decaying and crumbling. The window was open and I could hear occasional shouts from below.
"It's really minimal. Have you ever been outside?"
"No."
"So, do you want to see it?" She went in her room to get dressed in a green skirt held with a white ribbon, silver shoes, white top with black lace trim that left her navel bare, and short-sleeved and knee length shirt of translucent silk, rosette designs at the shoulders. She picked up a cloth and bamboo parasol, tied her hair with a blue paisley cloth, and motioned for me to come with her.
"Come on, I know a way out," she said, running down the stairs.
"What if someone notices us?"
"We just say we live outside. Under Vaishalian law, that's perfectly acceptable."
"It's not through a sewer, is it?" We stepped outside again. The air in the hallway was still, smelling musty and stale, the floorboards creaked as we walked. Spiders built webs around the lamps, the desiccated husks of moths hanging ensnared. There was a threadbare carpet laid in front of the door.
"No, it's in a subway. And you don't need to worry about trains, because they haven't been running outside the enclave for a month. And what if you walked further than our stop, you ask, hmm? Well, here's what there is. You walk until you smell fresh air and hear birds and other things, and see sunlight again. And you reach the outside. But it's blocked off by a grate. Seems that insurgents were coming inside through the subway tunnels."
"I'd like to see what's outside."
"Oh, sure."
"And don't wealthy households still keep servants?"
"Yes, but nowadays, they stay in the godowns rather than back in their areas."

The Day Market was devoid of people, though remnants of them still remained, along with the spoiled leavings of food. At each end of the hallway was a circular room with six levels of balconies with hundreds of tables shaded by parasols. Many sections were marked "Selinians only!" with obscene marks. The ceiling was a plexiglass dome with wrought iron. Glass tubes with neon, gold, copper, argon, and cadmium vapors still lit up storefronts blocked off by grates. An elevator shaft with krypton and argon tube lights in rings above gleaming doors, and bridges extending to the balconies from each stop dominated the center of the room. Palm trees grew in bronze pots. A ghoul fed on foul meat. It stuck out its sinuous, forked tongue and hissed at me as a threat. I backed off.
Down some moist, decaying concrete stairs was a gated-off, decrepit passage marked with the word "Vaishalians." in neat block lettering, and "This is an injustice!" in phosphorescent yellow paint, along with other, smaller obscenities in three different languages. Marciana leapt down the stairs, and I carefully followed her. None of the lights were on, and some of them looked smashed. In fact, it looked like it had been left this way for much longer than a month.
"No trains stop here anymore."

The exit was overgrown with moss, lianas, and fungus, and the floor was wet with muck. Beyond the grate, I could see the ground the tracks were on slope gently upward towards a thicket of cycads and grevillea, hear the droning of flies and the songs of birds, and, to my surprise, human voices.
"There are people out there."
"Can you understand them?" I asked.
"Sort of."
"I think I can make it out. What does he think he's doing, anyway? The magistrates will kill him."
"It's what he wants."
"But they'll have a crackdown if he does. He's taking too big a risk."
"It's so shortsighted, I know," she sighed. We turned back. "He wants to be a martyr to the Vaishali resistance, but all he'll get is more repression."
"Desperate times, I guess, and desperate actions."
"Anyway, one of the stations back there has a broken lock on the gate that nobody discovered."

Vaishali's streets were as humid as within the enclave, but a lot more cramped, more filled with life. The district where we emerged from an abandoned subway station were crumbling four story buildings and a shanty town built on them like fungus on a tree. A mother bathed her two children in the stagnant canal water where sunlight shone through bamboo leaves and the spaces between the buildings, as a man tended a dead ghoul on a spit. Chickens wandered about, tethered to posts, and pecked at the meager food on the ground. Clothes and sheets dried on wires. Bicycles, motor vehicles, and rickshaws went by on the road. A trio of musicians played the khaen, balafon, and salai.
"Come on, let's get some food."
"So this is why you aren't starving."
"They won't starve us if we're actually nice to them. They're not savages, you know. They didn't need us to elevate them from living in some mud huts."
"Do you know why the rioting started?"
"Something happened in Dholavira. And they couldn't play the Kish card this time. Everyone already knows what really happened. And there's been that comet in the sky for the past few days. A lot of people are taking that as a sign of change."
"Self-fulfilling, if you ask me."
"You're right, it is. But, you know, you must be starving."
"I caught a couple of rats. And..."
She laughed. "Yes. Real food. This place is good." I followed her into a large cafe, with colorful tiles covering the walls, intricate carpets of blue, red, and sea green, and potted ferns and palms in the corners. We sat together in a corner.
"Do you think I talk too much?" she asked me.
"Not at all. In fact, I enjoy our conversations. Takes my mind off the banality and the pain of being stuck here." She smiled.
"Erawan said I did." She looked at the floor.
"Erawan?"
"We were together for a few months, and lasted until a few weeks after Khenpo died. He was your typical western Champassakan, from Ban Talad Kao. They have a reputation for being stuffy and overly conservative, and this guy didn't help. I thought there were revolutions on Emerald to get his kind out of power, and not so they could just turn around here and conquer Kantipur and Licchavi. He seemed idealistic, once, but it never came to anything. I guess he's the kind of person who acts nice at first to get close to you all the while poisoning you. So, it turns out he sold Khenpo out, the fucking..." She put her hand to her mouth. "I'm sorry. Excuse my language. I'm so sorry." she said, exasperated.
"It's not a problem, Marciana. It never was."
"Ah, um, of course not," she stumbled over her words. "I don't know why he did it. It always makes me upset to think about it. He was tortured to death. Khenpo, I mean. I can't talk about the details without getting really pissed."
"Do you think he was forced into it?" I asked her.
"I think he did it willingly. He was a powerful person, despite not actually being a Champassakan official. He knew Champassakan higher-ups and had influence and knew how to wield it. He treated me like I was his property and not as a close mutual friend. I don't even know if he wanted a child. And he resented the fact that I was getting to know Khenpo. By then, I was involved in an affair with Khenpo, and I was just with Erawan because I needed him around for support. He knew I needed to be with him as well. But I managed to use him to support the resistance in Sarnath. But I had to leave when things got really bad and he set our apartment on fire, and I jumped out the window. He tried to make it look like it was the Kantipuran resistance. You've noticed the necklace, haven't you? That's why I have it. I still feel responsible for his death. I mean, if it wasn't for my affair, he'd have not attracted the attention of the Champassakan military and a certain lapdog of theirs. I hope the mob stoned him. They've been stoning officials and collaborators, just like here. I think the comet has something to do with it. I'm too insecure from the whole ordeal."
"You've always been that shy, insecure girl."
"Gee, thanks."
She bought a bag of kozhukatta and fig halva, broke off a piece, gave it to me.

From inside a temple, a serene-voiced woman recited a mantra to Shiva.
"What are you doing out here?" a man said, seeming more concerned than threatening. He was the passenger in a four seat patrol car, and was dressed in official-looking clothes. "Look at how these people live," he sighed.
"What do you mean?"
"Shantih, shantih, shantih." came the end of the mantra.
"An assassin managed to sneak in to the Palace and kill Theodosius. The acting Exarch is ordering an evacuation."
"Is this an act of war?" Marciana asked the man.
"I don't know. It wasn't the first time this happened. Salomea says that if the Exarchs want to be independent so badly, they should deal with these problems on their own. Remember, it's not Selinia they have a problem with. They can handle the taxes, which are less than they are under Simudra or Langkasuka. They can handle the occasional purge."

I checked the newsfeed for more information. It was carried out by a lone assassin. The People's Liberation Army appears to be condemning it.
"It's like I said. Crackdown. The people of Vaishali will not have that." I said to Marciana, who was in her room changing clothes while I was looking at the newsfeed, and was now sitting next to me in black shorts and a pink, blue, and sea green silk shirt over a black top.
"It could be anything. There's been condemnation of the Exarchs in the Senate for their excesses."
"I don't think we'd target our own."
"Yeah. But it would be so much easier for an agent working for the Senate to infiltrate than it would for some random Vaishalian." She wrapped a blue and black skirt around her waist, fastened it with a pewter and emerald leaf clip. "Maybe it's a mutiny amongst the Praetorian Guard."
'Notice: All Selinians remaining within the city are to proceed to a safehouse where they can be picked up by the next floater.' The nearest one was located in Government House.

"Oh, wow, that's coincidental. So, I wonder what's to become of Vaishali now that it's open war against them. They're just going to let the rioters destroy Vaishali?"
"Open war against who?"
"I have no idea what faction is responsible for this. We're already trying to hold on to our influence among the Ministry of Twelve Wise Ones and some warlords in the inner provinces and Archipelago, so probably war against the PLA or one of the rogue elements of the MTWO. If you remember, there's been a civil war going on for six years, but it hasn't really spread outside the Archipelago, at least to my knowledge."

The train dropped us off at the bottom of that hill. There were apartments with hanging gardens here, and the streets were lined with kapok and jacaranda trees and canals with water lilies and water hyacinth. There were few dead here, only one from a recent skirmish, the others ignored and left there to rot for weeks. Galliots and corvettes flew overhead.
We climbed the long stairs to Government House, manchineel trees off to the side to discourage and impede tresspassers. Part of it went through some natural caves decorated with gilded carvings, and then the stairs curved out again through beflowered arches, through a garden with a waterfall, parakeets, quetzals and birds of paradise perched in the jacaranda trees and peacocks strutting about in the cropped grass, and in to the building. Two clibinarii stood outside, powered armors of an elaborately intimidating design, plating glazed blood-red, with gold crescents with circles between the horns as helmet ornamentation and carrying gilded swords with silver and ruby hilts and tower shields.
About fifty others were in the entrance hall when we arrived. The entry hall was spacious and opulent, with square marble tiles of black and white, and walls decorated with intricate arabesques. On both sides of the door were moonfruit trees in cast iron pots. Up the stairs, the door was flanked by statues of men in crested helmets wielding partisans, matching the clibinarii outside. I looked out a large window with gilded grating to the side and looked at the war going on in the harbor. Helicopters and fighters were destroying carriers and supply argosies, some of them shot down by rockets.
A Praetorian in indigo velvet robes and silvered armor, armed with a halberd descended the balustraded staircase, flanked by ordinary soldiers in dove-gray, condottieri from Vengi in more outrageous panoply, and guards of his own in violet.
"I am Praetorian Prefect and acting Exarch Decorosus," he greeted, removing his crested helmet. "As you all know, Exarch Theodosius is dead and we have not yet found whomever is responsible for this. Most likely, it was someone affiliated with either Simudra or Langkasuka taking advantage of the situation, rather than an ambitious local. Still, we are confident in our ability to beat back their pitiful band of rebels. They should not be able to enter this palace."
Decorosus led us to a small room on the fourth floor. It was less grandiose than the entry hall or some of the upper levels. There was a antique blackwood table with maps and yellowed notes strewn across it, surrounded by wheeled chairs upholstered with synthetic leather. The walls were painted a sterile sea green and paneled with teak. The wall opposite the door was glass, overlooking the city.
Until now, the artillery was poised outside as reminders to the locals of exactly whose mercy their lives were dependent on. Now, a dozen pillars of black smoke rose from the city as bombshells arced above and orbs of blue light bolted at crowds.

"We won't be able to get on the same floater. I have family in Nicopolis. When we get there, I'll make arrangements for you to stay with us for a while."