Even our prayers are to farang, Kanya thinks. A farang antidote for a farang plague.

Take any tool you can find. Make it your own, Jaidee said in times past, explaining why they consorted with the worst. Why they bribed and stole and encouraged monsters like Gi Bu Sen.

A machete doesn't care who wields it, or who made it. Take the knife and it will cut. Take the farang if they will be a tool in your hand. And if it turns on you, melt it down. You will have at least the raw materials.

Take any tool. He was always practical.

But it hurts. They hunt and beg for scraps of knowledge from abroad, scavenge like cheshires for survival. So much knowledge sits inside the Midwest Compact. When a promising genetic thinker arises somewhere in the world, they are cowed and bullied and bribed to work with the other best and brightest in Des Moines or Changsha. It takes a strong researcher to resist a PurCal or AgriGen or RedStar. And even if they do stand up to the calorie companies, what does the Kingdom offer them? Even their best computers are generations behind those of the calorie companies.

Kanya shakes off the thought. We are alive. We are alive when whole kingdoms and countries are gone. When Malaya is a morass of killing. When Kowloon is underwater. When China is split and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is nothing but starvation. The Empire of America is no more. The Union of the Europeans splintered and factionalized. And yet we endure, even expand. The Kingdom survives. Thank the Buddha that he extends a compassionate hand and that our Queen has enough merit to attract these terrifying farang tools without which we would be completely defenseless.

She reaches a final checkpoint. Endures another inspection of her papers. Doors slide aside and then she is invited into an electric elevator. She feels the air sucked in with her, negative pressure, and then the doors close.

Kanya plunges into the earth, as though she is falling into hell. She thinks of the hungry ghosts that populate this awful facility. The spirits of the dead who sacrificed themselves to leash the demons of the world. Her skin prickles.

Down.

Down.

The elevator's doors open. A white hall and an airlock. Out of her clothes. Into a shower heavy with chlorine. Out on the other side.

A boy offers her lab clothes and reconfirms her identification from a list. He informs her she won't need secondary containment procedures and then leads Kanya down more halls.

The scientists here carry the haunted looks of people who know they are under siege. They know that beyond a few doors, all manner of apocalyptic terrors wait to swallow them. If Kanya thinks about it, her bowels go watery. That was Jaidee's strength. He had faith in his past lives and future ones. Kanya, though? She will be reborn to die of cibiscosis a dozen times before she is allowed to progress once more. Kamma.

"You should have considered that before you gave me up to them," Jaidee says.

Kanya stumbles at his voice. Jaidee is trailing a few paces behind her. Kanya gasps and presses her back against a wall. Jaidee cocks his head, studying her. Kanya can't breathe. Will he simply strangle her here, to pay her back for her betrayals?

Her guide stops. "Are you sick?" he asks.

Jaidee is gone.

Kanya's heart is pounding. She's sweating. If she were any further into containment, she would have to ask to be quarantined, beg not to be let out, to accept that some bacteria or virus had made the jump and that she was going to die.

"I'm-" she gags, remembering the blood on the steps of General Pracha's administrative building. Jaidee's dismembered body, a careful brutal package. Ragged death.

"Do you need a doctor?"

Kanya tries to control her breathing. Jaidee is haunting her. His phii following her. She tries to control her fear. "I'm fine." She nods to the guide. "Let's go. Finish this now."

A minute later the guide indicates a door and nods that Kanya should step through. As Kanya opens the door, Ratana looks up from her files. Smiles slightly in the glow of her monitor.

The computers down here all have large screens. Some of them are models that haven't existed in fifty years and burn more energy than five new ones, but they do their work and in return are meticulously maintained. Still, the amount of power burning through them makes Kanya weak in the knees. She can almost see the ocean rising in response. It's a horrifying thing to stand beside.

"Thank you for coming," Ratana says.

"Of course I came."

No mention of earlier trysts. No mention of shared history, gone awry. That Kanya could not play tom and dee with one she would inevitably betray. That was too much hypocrisy, even for Kanya. And yet Ratana is still beautiful. Kanya remembers laughing with her, taking a skiff out across the Chao Phraya and watching paper boats glowing all around them during Loi Kratong. Remembers the feel of Ratana curled against her as the waves lapped and as thousands of little candles burned, the city's wishes and prayers blanketing the waters.

Ratana motions her over. Shows her a set of photos on her screen. She catches sight of Kanya's captain's tags on her white collar. "I'm sorry about Jaidee. He was… good."

Kanya grimaces, trying to shake off the memory of his phii in the halls outside. "He was better than that." She studies the bodies that glow in front of her. "What am I seeing?"

"Two men. From two different hospitals."

"Yes?"

"They had something in them. Something worrisome. It seems to be a variant of blister rust."

"Yes? And? They ate something tainted. They died. So?"

Ratana shakes her head. "It was hosted in them. Propagating. I've never seen it host itself in a mammal."

Kanya looks over the hospital records. "Who are they?"

"We don't know."

"No family visited them? No one saw them arrive? They didn't say?"

"One was incoherent when he was admitted. The other was already deep into blister rust collapse."

"You're sure they didn't just eat tainted fruit?"

Ratana shrugs. Her skin is smooth and pale from a life underground. Not like Kanya whose skin has darkened like a peasant's in the harsh sun of active patrol. And yet Kanya would always choose to work above ground, not down here, in the darkness. Ratana is the brave one. Kanya is sure of it. She wonders what personal demons have driven Ratana to work in this hellish place. When they were together, Ratana never talked about her past. About her losses. But they are there. They have to be, like rocks under the waves and froth of a coastline. There are always rocks.

"No, of course I'm not sure. Not one hundred percent."

"Fifty percent?"

She shrugs again, uncomfortable, goes back to her papers. "You know I can't make assertions like that. But the virus is different, the protein alterations in their samples are variants. The breakdown of the tissue doesn't match the standard fingerprint of blister rust. In testing, it conforms to blister rusts we've seen before. AgriGen and TotalNutrient variations, AG134.s and TN249.x.d Both of them offer strong similarities." She pauses.

"Yes?"

"But it was in the lungs."

"Cibiscosis, then."

"No. It was blister rust." Ratana looks at Kanya. "You see the problem?"

"And we know nothing about their history, their travel? Were they abroad maybe? On a clipper ship? Crossing into Burma. Over into South China? They're not from the same village, perhaps?"

Ratana shrugs. "We have no history for either of them. Just the sickness to link them. We used to have a population database with DNA records, family history, work and housing data, but they were taken offline to provide more processing power for pre-emptive research." She shrugs. "In any case, so few people were bothering to register, it didn't make any sense."