CHAPTER 40

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

In the beginning there was lightning and then agony, sharp where it shouldn't have been. Where no one should be touching her.

"CV-1," a voice said, sounding matter-of-fact. "Also essential for countering heart attacks, near-drowning, frigidity, bed-wetting, incontinence and related ailments."

Fingers moved from between her legs to her chest, rolling up the latex top of her jump suit and the voice said, "Do I need the quill?"

It was speaking mostly to itself.

The fingers found a point on Tris's sternum, settled one finger on top of another and pressed in the bony hollow of her chest, at a point exactly equidistant between her nipples.

"CV-17," said the voice. "Good for confusion, hysteria, high blood pressure, breathing ailments, difficulty swallowing and assorted similar maladies..."

The pressure increased and then lifted as the darkness unwrapped itself, leaving Tris facing the top half of an anxious-looking young man, whose skin was as white as his tied-back ponytail. Above the waist he was as real as Tris, below this he seemed a mere shadow. At least that's what Tris thought, until the boy flicked back the other half of his cloak and suddenly she could see all of him.

"Unlucky," he said, helping Tris to her feet. "Getting lightning struck like that." The boy was taller than anybody she'd ever seen, his face soft and somehow bloodless, pale like snow or high clouds in a summer sky.

"Aren't there two of you?" Tris said.

Luca Pacioli shrugged. "There are dozens of us," he said. "Unfortunately, these days they're all me." Thrusting out his hand, the young man offered it to Tris.

His shake was tentative.

His skin cold.

"I'm Luca Pacioli," he said. "Ambassador Luca Pacioli. You're welcome to use my house if you need to sleep. I'm a baron," he added, rather diffidently. "A very poor one, sadly."

Luca let his eyes trail across her ripped jump suit, hesitating at the tear above one breast and stopping altogether when his gaze reached her bare abdomen where the trousers barely clung to her hips.

"You must have walked far," he said.

Tris nodded.

"A pity about your ship."

"My...?"

"That little racing yacht of yours. I saw it skim overhead a few days ago. Very pretty. You must have been upset when they shot it down."

"I crashed it," Tris said. "No one shot it down."

Luca's glance was kind. "That's not what I heard. The imperial guard took it out. I listen to the private feeds," he added. "I'm not meant to but there's not much else to do."

Somehow while he'd been talking, Luca had managed to steer Tris in a wide circle across rough grass and a broken path, so that now Tris found herself heading back the way she'd come.

"It's okay," he said. "You can trust me."

"Yeah," said Tris. "That's what they all say."

There was a feed bar on the fifteenth level of Rip, right at the bottom of the Razor's Edge where she'd wasted one summer. Actually there were several bars but they had merged into one in her memory and the jump area was called the Razor's Edge, because that's what it was.

A ragged scar down the inside of the world. Someone had sealed the Rip with spun glass, the silvery kind which was meant to catch radiation. Although Tris didn't believe it worked because too many jumpers she knew got sick and died from the coughs. You could always tell who was going to go next because their skin went bad and their eyes developed that haunted look, like they knew what was going to happen but didn't want anyone mentioning it.

Tris's health remained good but that was Tris, she'd never been ill in her life and the one thing she'd learnt from her time on the fifteenth was it really didn't matter if the guy was dying or not, you really, really couldn't trust anyone who said, "You can trust me."

You just couldn't.

And if they said, "I'm not going to hurt you" they always did.

"This way," Luca said, leading Tris towards a turning off the road between a broken wall on one side and a mound of rubble, so brush-covered that it was nearly impossible to work out what had been there originally, on the other.

"Fechner's house," said Luca. "You know what its number was?"

Of course she didn't.

"Think of two numbers," said Luca, "then add them together to make a third."

Tris did what she was told, though she kept the numbers small so that the sums were easy.

"Now add the second number to the third, which will give you a fourth."

That was a bit harder.

"Now add those two together to give you a fifth."

As they walked Tris added numbers until she lost count of how many times Luca had asked her to do this.

"Finished adding the last two?"

"Yeah." Tris nodded.

"Good," said Luca, "now take that final number and the one before and calculate the ratio between them." He walked in silence while Tris worked out first what his instruction meant and then whether she could answer it.

"Well?"

"One point six?" Tris said finally.

"You sure?"

"Pretty much."

Luca smiled. "That's Fechner's number," he said. "You need to remember it." Tris was going to ask why but the boy now stood in front of a shimmering silver wall, concentrating hard while he did something complicated with his fingers.

Luca Pacioli lived in a palace. More precisely, he lived in part of the Emperor's palace, the one everyone recognized from the feed. Not in the actual Qiangquing Gong, obviously enough, but definitely a replica of what was intended to be a suite in a guest wing.

"That's the Jiulongbi, the Nine Dragon Screen!"

"Yes," Luca said sadly, "it is."

Someone had painted the Jiulongbi onto cloth and nailed it to the window frame, so the canvas faced inwards. The painting was crude and most of the nails holding it in place had rusted to the colour of dried blood. When Tris reached out to touch the canvas, flakes of dragon scale came off on her fingers.

"We used to have a real picture," said Luca. "One that did light and dark and showed eunuchs scurrying past the window and soldiers gathering on parade. The sky even showed black cranes flying."

"What happened?" she said.

"It broke." He shrugged. "My father kept it going for as long as he could. Far longer than was reasonable but in the end... you know. Things break." Luca gave her water and what might have been some kind of dry bread. And while Tris wolfed down the food, Luca told her about his childhood.

His father had brought him to Rapture so long before that Luca couldn't even remember when his father had died.

The pavilion had been glorious then, crowded with family, retainers, animals and servants who wore drab but functional smocks and wooden clogs for when the courtyard got waterlogged.

Ambassador Pacioli had chosen the servants and animals, just as he'd chosen his retainers and those who made up his secretariat. An important person in his own civilization, his luck had always been bad. A lucky man would have found reasons why someone else should go instead.

The replica of the guest wing in which Luca now lived had been the idea of Lady Pacioli, Luca's mother. It was not a particularly original idea because endless ambassadors had undergone training in replica palaces before taking up their posts. The novelty lay in Lady Pacioli's suggestion that the replica should be taken with them.

A feat less difficult than it sounded since all she needed was to acquire enough spiders to create whichever replica was appropriate. The secret was to instruct the spiders so they knew in advance exactly what they were meant to be doing.

The way Luca said this made Tris decide that he was reciting it from memory rather than actually understanding what spiders were or how they could grow a palace from the ground up.