At another point in the city, not the coastal district but the central commercial sector, where the streets were wider and the buildings taller and the flow of people carried the specific rhythm of a place where money changed hands constantly and everyone had somewhere to be, João was collecting taxes.
From beggars.
It was not official imperial policy.
It was João’s personal policy, developed after arriving in that part of the city that morning for reasons he himself had not fully articulated, though they had something to do with a conversation he had had with Sarah the night before about fiscal responsibility and redistribution of resources, which he had processed in a way Sarah probably had not intended to be processed.
Humanity invents economics and then hands it to João.
A catastrophic administrative decision.
— Tax on begging activity — João said to a man sitting on the ground with a hat turned upward in front of him.
— Article seven hundred and thirty-two of the empire’s tax code.
The beggar looked at João.
At the general’s uniform.
At the three bodyguards positioned at a strategic distance.
Then back at João.
— That doesn’t exist — said the beggar.
— It does.
— It doesn’t, general.
— I just created it.
— You can’t do that.
— I’m number three on the Island.
— That’s not how taxes work.
João opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again with the energy of someone two seconds away from getting irritated but who still had unused reserves of argument available.
Across the street, behind a spice stall, there was a man who was very clearly doing something other than buying spices.
Wrong observation angle for shopping.
The posture of someone trying to look casual and who had miscalibrated the effort.
His eyes kept drifting toward João and then snapping elsewhere with the specific frequency of poorly trained surveillance.
Kialapakial noticed first.
Kialapakial was the bodyguard who noticed things first.
One hundred and ninety-two centimeters tall, silent with the completeness of someone for whom silence was a natural state rather than an effort, with eyes that processed the environment the way security systems process things, not with dramatic attention but with the constant, emotionless scanning of someone trained until noticing became automatic.
Dbajabu and Mbiwenbiwenbe responded with the synchronization of people who had developed a nonverbal language over enough time for it to function with the fluidity of actual speech.
Dbajabu was broad where Kialapakial was tall, the same height but twice the lateral presence, with shoulders that turned the geometry of any hallway into a matter of negotiation.
Mbiwenbiwenbe was the youngest of the three, with a name that had caused administrative problems throughout the entire army documentation system and which he carried with the indifference of someone who had established very early that the name was not his problem but the problem of whoever needed to write it down.
The three converged on the spice stall with the efficiency of an operation that had not been discussed because it did not need to be.
The spy realized too late.
The room they brought him to existed somewhere between the commercial district and the barracks, inside a building that looked administrative from the outside and was the functional version of administrative on the inside, functional in the sense that the functions carried out there were not the functions the façade suggested.
The chair in the center was solid wood.
On the table in front of it rested a device the spy recognized with the specific unease of recognizing something you had hoped never to have reason to recognize up close.
The lie detector.
Not the kind of lie detector known outside the World of Naicity, the machines of blood pressure and breathing and galvanic conductivity that measured anxiety and which any honest interrogation manual admitted were about as reliable as well-calibrated intuition.
This one was different.
This one worked, not because there was explicit magic in it, but because it had been built at a point in the World of Naicity where the boundary between what is measurable and what is simply true was thinner than conventional physics comfortably admitted.
Kialapakial sat on the other side of the table.
With the same expression he did everything with, an expression that was not calculated intimidation but intimidated in the same way great heights intimidate, not through intention but through nature.
— Name — he said.
The spy gave his name.
— Organization.
The spy said he had no organization.
The detector did not react in any visible way, but something in the air of the room shifted subtly enough for the spy to understand that it had been registered.
— Who you work for.
The spy said he worked independently.
The air shifted again.
The questions continued.
About the surveillance target.
About the duration of the mission.
About what had been observed and what had been reported and where it had been sent.
The spy answered with the mixture of partial truths and strategic omissions that people in his profession develop as second nature, and the detector registered each response with a precision that made the strategy progressively less comfortable to maintain.
Kialapakial showed no frustration.
Showed nothing at all.
He asked the questions with the same rhythm and the same volume, like a process that had time to work and was willing to use that time.
Until the final question. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Dbajabu, who had remained posted by the wall through the entire interrogation without saying a word, leaned forward and placed a piece of paper in front of Kialapakial.
Kialapakial looked at the paper.
Looked at the spy.
— Final question — he said.
The spy waited.
— You sit on cassava.
The spy processed the question.
The question had no context.
There was no narrative leading into it, no line of inquiry that justified it, no logic connecting it to anything that had been asked before.
It was a question existing in an entirely separate dimension of reality, one that had entered that room for reasons that defied any professional analysis of interrogation protocol.
Somewhere, an intelligence academy instructor would have a stroke trying to diagram this conversation.
— No — said the spy, with the firmness of someone answering something absurd that nonetheless still had a correct answer.
The detector reacted.
Not subtly.
With the unmistakable clarity of something that had found what it was looking for and saw no reason to be discreet about the result.
A voice emerged from the device, not mechanical, not distorted, but the voice of someone who had been recorded at some point for this exact purpose, with the calm tone of a factual statement:
— Yes.
He sits down slowly for the boys.
Absolute silence filled the room.
The spy stared at the detector.
Dbajabu stared at the detector.
Mbiwenbiwenbe, standing by the door, looked up at the ceiling with the expression of someone actively practicing not having a reaction.
Kialapakial looked at the paper with the final question written on it, then at the spy, then at the detector, with the expression of someone processing multiple things simultaneously and intending to process each one with equal seriousness.
The spy kept staring at the detector for a long time.
With the expression of a man who had accepted many things upon entering the profession of espionage.
Who had prepared for the possibility of capture, interrogation, the revelation of information he would rather keep private.
Who had calculated risks and accepted consequences.
Who had not calculated this.