“You awake?”

“Yeah,” he said, watching his door open.

“Are you okay to talk?”

“It’s three in the morning,” said Kit. “Can’t it wait?”

“No,” Neku said, shaking her head. “Probably not.”

He caught the sweep of one hip, a shoulder, and a curve of breast in silhouette as she turned back from shutting the door behind her. Absolute certainty of her nakedness came with a splinter of street light between her thighs as she walked towards him.

“I’m not going back to Japan,” said Neku. Sitting on the edge of Kit’s bed she reached for the covers, her fingers tugging at the edge of his quilt.

“Neku.”

The tussle was brief and Kit won.

“Why?” she asked, when she’d done what Kit demanded and put on his yukata, tying its belt tight around her. She still sat on his bed, only now her legs were folded under her and only one foot could be seen. Her arms were folded and she’d hunched inside herself, visibly furious with him.

“You’re a kid,” said Kit.

Neku snorted. “In some prefectures,” she said, “the age of consent is thirteen. Anyway,” Neku added crossly, “you wouldn’t be my first.”

“Maybe not,” Kit said, “but that’s hardly the point.”

“So it’s definitely my age?”

He nodded.

“Would it help,” said Neku, “if I told you how old I really was?”

“Probably not.” Kit had her pegged at fifteen or sixteen. Although, since Japanese girls could look young for their age, she might be seventeen, though he doubted it. She behaved like a child, for all that she sometimes pretended to be something else.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m hundreds of years older than you.”

“Hundreds?”

“Thousands,” said Neku. “Ten of thousands. I don’t even know when this is, it’s so long ago…”

CHAPTER 40 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

“Where’s Luc?” Lady Katchatka demanded.

“Being miserable somewhere,” said Nico. “Knowing him.”

“And your sister?”

Lady Katchatka glanced at her three sons. Nico sat at her feet, sharpening the blade of a katana said to be older than the family itself, while the two elder boys knelt by a wall, playing cards. Something simple, like clans.

“Well?”

“She was in the gardens,” said Antonio. “Playing with her stupid cat.” Antonio dealt another card, only to swear when his brother scooped the pile.

“And when was this?” asked Lady Katchatka.

“After lunch.”

The old woman sighed. “Nico?”

Her youngest son ran a sharpening glass down one edge of his blade, then wiped the metal with a finger, checking the silver dust he found there. “She’s asleep in the spire,” he said, without looking up.

Petro snorted.

“I thought it best to check,” Nico said coldly.

She was going to have to deal with this, Lady Katchatka decided. But not now and certainly not before the wedding banquet was over.

“Sound asleep?”

Nico scowled.

“Well,” Lady Katchatka demanded. “Was she sound asleep?”

“Dead to this world,” said Nico.

Also curled up in a corner. Although Nico didn’t need to mention this, because everyone knew how Neku slept. She’d been curling up in stray corners from the day she was born.

How odd, Lady Neku thought. Why would Nico lie about having gone to my room? Shaking her head, the girl edged round a half pillar, looking for a better peep hole. Unlike the pillar’s far side, which pretended to be marble, the side Lady Neku edged round was unpolished metal, with fat bolts that fixed it to the sheet steel beneath her feet. This was because Lady Neku was inside a hollow wall.

She’d been nine when she discovered the trick. A door into the Stroll Garden had been locked and Lady Neku wanted to be on the other side. So angry had Lady Neku been that she hit the door; not softly or in pretend anger, but hard enough to split the skin of her knuckles. Only the pain Lady Neku expected to feel on her second blow never came, because the door dissolved beneath her punch and she found herself with her arm stuck almost entirely through its surface.

When screaming produced no help, she tried reason. At nine, of course, Lady Neku could already outthink Antonio and Petro. Even Nico, who was used to being the most intelligent, had come to realise his sister was talented. Which was probably why he’d locked her out of the garden in the first place.

After reason failed, the nine-year-old began to push at the door with her shoulder, finally falling through. Since this was obviously impossible, she decided not to mention it to her mother or brothers.

So began her travels. At first she simply walked through doors. Although this was a clumsy way to describe the intricate negotiation her body made with the physical boundaries around it. The following year Lady Neku realised that if she approached hollow walls face on and then stepped sideways, she could remain within the wall itself.

By then she’d done some basic research and decided it was down to the molecules of her body negotiating miu space within the molecules making the wall. This was, she later discovered, almost entirely wrong. Whatever, Lady Neku increased her ability to wander, until even Nico became disquieted by the things his sister knew.

She became the family ghost, the half wit others barely mentioned, wandering alone down abandoned corridors or climbing the sheer sides of cathedral-high hangers to hide on ledges for days.

Cold, hungry, lost, and alone—they were some of the happiest days of her life. She discovered the drop zone, filled with pods designed to make one-way trips to the planet’s surface. And having made her first drop, she introduced herself to her family’s castle, which found it hard to accept she’d made no provision for her return.

“Really?” Schloss Omga asked.

“Really,” said Lady Neku, sounding remarkably unworried, given she’d forgotten to bring food and the heat inside the castle’s shell was already gluing her shirt to her back. So the castle returned her anyway. Shifting the nine-year-old a hundred kilometres straight up, from ground level to High Strange, as simply as Lady Neku herself moved through doors.

Next time she did the drop, the castle said, I suppose you expect me to do that again? And Lady Neku simply nodded.

Mostly it was her silence and self-sufficiency that worried Nico, Antonio, and Petro. She avoided physical contact, long talks, sympatico symbionts, and all the other little tics that bound her brothers to her mother. She was herself, the original. Everyone else was just a copy.

“Okay, then,” Lady Neku heard her mother say. “We’re all agreed?”

The idea of her mother asking approval of her brothers was so surprising that Lady Neku hesitated on the edge of leaving and decided to stay where she was.

Looking up from his blade, Nico said, “Are you sure about not telling Neku?”

“It seems best.”

“She’s going to take it badly. You know she will.”

Lady Katchatka nodded, mostly to herself. “Better this way,” she said. “Neku’s going to be upset whatever.”

“So we don’t tell her about Luc?” That was Antonio.

“No,” said Lady Katchatka, “we don’t.” Having carefully placed his cards face down on the floor, Petro glanced between his mother and Antonio. “And we don’t tell her about Lord d’Alambert either?”

“We don’t tell her about anything,” said Nico. “It’s a secret.”

“That’s right,” Lady Katchatka said. “It’s a secret.”

Antonio and Petro nodded.

After the two eldest boys returned to their cards Nico stood up and swished his katana through the air, listening to its note; then he wiped its blade one final time and sat himself at a window seat, staring out over the wastes of Katchatka Segment below. A moment later, his mother joined him. Unfortunately, they were too far away for Lady Neku to hear what was said.