"Don't you feel like a hypocrite, coming here, of all places, at Trade's whim?"

"Shut up, Jaidee."

Jaidee kneels beside her. "Well, at least you're giving some good fruit."

"Shut up."

She wants to pray, but with Jaidee bothering her, it's useless. After another minute, she gives up and goes back outside to the increasing morning light and heat. Narong is there, leaning against a post, watching the khon dances. The drums beat and the dancers go through their stylized turns, their voices raised high and stark, competing with the drone of the ranked monks across the courtyard. Kanya joins him.

Narong holds up a hand. "Wait until they're done."

She masters her irritation and finds a seat, watches as the story of Rama is played out. Finally Narong nods, satisfied. "It's good, isn't it?" He tilts his head toward the pillar shrine. "Have you made your offerings?"

"You care?"

Other white shirts cluster in the compound, making their own offerings. Asking for promotions to better paying assignments. Asking for success in their investigations. Asking for protection from the diseases that they run up against every day. By its nature, this is a shrine for the Environment Ministry, almost as important as the temple of Phra Seub, the biodiversity martyr. It makes her nervous to speak with Narong in front of them all, but he appears entirely unconcerned.

"We all love the city," he says. "Not even Akkarat will fail to defend it."

Kanya makes a face. "What do you want from me?"

"So impatient. Let's walk."

She scowls. Narong seems unhurried, and yet he has summoned her as if it is an emergency. She tamps her fury and mutters, "Do you know what you've interrupted?"

"Tell me as we walk."

"I have a village with five dead and we still haven't isolated the cause."

He glances over, interested. "A new cibiscosis?" He guides her out of the compound, past the marigold sellers. Walking onward.

"We don't know." She masters her frustration. "But you're delaying me from my work, and though it may please you to make me run like a dog when you call-"

"We have a problem," Narong interrupts. "And though you think your village is important, it is nothing in comparison to this. There has been a death. A very prominent one. We need your help in the investigation."

She laughs, "I'm not the police-"

"It's not a police matter. There was a windup involved."

She stops short. "A what?"

"The killer. We believe it is an invasive. A military windup. Heechy-keechy."

"How is that possible?"

"It is something we also are trying to understand." Narong looks at her seriously. "And we cannot ask the question, because General Pracha has taken control of the investigation, claiming jurisdiction because the windup is an interdicted creature. As if it were a cheshire or a yellow card." He laughs bitterly. "We are blocked entirely. You will investigate on our behalf."

"That's difficult. It is not my investigation. Pracha will not-"

"He trusts you."

"Trusting me to do my job and allowing me to meddle are two different things." She shrugs and turns away. "It's impossible."

"No!" Narong grabs her and yanks her back. "This is vital! We must know the details!"

Kanya whirls, throws Narong's hand off her shoulder. "Why? What is so important about this? People die all over Bangkok, every day. We find bodies faster than we can shovel them into methane composters. What's so important about this one, that you'd have me cross the general?"

Narong pulls her close. "It's the Somdet Chaopraya. We have lost Her Royal Majesty's protector."

Kanya's knees buckle. Narong drags her upright, keeps talking, fiercely insistent. "Politics has become uglier since I started in this game." He has a smile on his face, but now Kanya sees the rage banked below. "You're a good girl, Kanya. We have always held our part of the bargain. But this is why you are here. I know this is difficult. You have loyalty to your superiors in the Environment Ministry as well. You pray to Phra Seub. This is good. It is right for you. But we require your help. Even if you have no taste for Akkarat anymore, the palace requires it."

"What do you want?"

"We need to know if this was Pracha's doing. He has been quick to take over the investigation. We must know if it was he who drove the knife. Your patron and the safety of the palace depends on this. It is possible that Pracha wishes to hide something. It could be some of his December 12 elements striking against us."

"It's not possible-"

"It is too convenient. We have been locked out entirely because it is a windup who did the killing." Narong's voice cracks with a sudden intensity. "We must know if the windup was planted by your ministry." He passes her a bundle of cash. Kanya stares at the amount, shocked. "Bribe anyone who gets in your way," he says.

She shakes off her paralysis, takes the money and stuffs it into her pockets. He touches her gently. "I am very sorry, Kanya. You're all I have. I depend on you to find our enemies and root them out."

The heat of a Ploenchit tower in the middle of the day is stifling. Investigators clog the dingy rooms of the club, adding to the swelter. It is a sick place to die. A place of hunger and desperation and appetites unfilled. Palace staffers crowd in the halls. Watching, conferring, preparing to collect the Somdet Chaopraya's body for placement in his funeral urn, waiting as Pracha's people investigate. Anxiety and anger hang in the air, politeness filed to an exquisite edge in this most humiliating and frightening moment. The rooms have the feeling of the monsoon just about to break, electric with energy, fraught with the unknown darkness of roiling clouds.

The first body lies on the floor outside, an old farang, surreal and alien. There is little physical damage to him, except the bruising where his throat was crushed, the livid torture that was done to his windpipe. He sprawls beside the bar with the mottled look of a corpse raised from the river. Some gangster bit of fish bait. The old man stares at her with wide blue eyes, two dead seas. Kanya studies the damage without speaking, then allows General Pracha's secretary to lead her to the interior rooms.

She gasps.

Blood stains everything, great swirls of it spatter the walls and drool across the floors. Bodies lie in tangled heaps. And among them lies the Somdet Chaopraya, his throat not smashed as was the old farang, but literally torn out, as though a tiger has fed upon him. His bodyguards lie dead, one with a spring gun blade buried in his eye socket, the other still clutching his own spring gun but peppered with blades.

"Kot rai," Kanya murmurs. She hesitates, uncertain of what to do in the presence of this sordid death. Ivory beetles tangle in the bloody froth. They skitter and scatter through it all, making tracks in the coagulant.

Pracha is in the room, conferring with his subordinates. He looks up at her gasp of dismay. The others have their own looks of shock, anxiety and embarrassment flickering on their faces. The thought that Pracha could arrange such a killing fills Kanya with sickness. The Somdet Chaopraya was no friend of the Environment Ministry, but the enormity of the act makes her ill. It is one thing to plot coups and counter-coups, another to reach inside the palace. She feels like a bamboo leaf drowning in floodwater currents.

So we all go, she tells herself. Even the richest and the most powerful are only meat for cheshires in the end. We are all nothing but walking corpses and to forget it is folly. Meditate on the nature of corpses and you will see this.

And yet still she is unnerved, almost panicked by the sight of a near-god's mortality before her. What have you done, General? It is too horrifying to consider. The flood currents threaten to suck her under.