“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night…they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.

“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.

“To kill…not in war or defence, but to…murder…is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment…but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices…if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew…and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.

“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.

“Yagharek’s was a heinous…a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree.”

“What did he do?” shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous twitching.

Kar’uchai spoke dispassionately.

“You would call it rape.”

Oh, I would call it rape, would I? thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.

I would call it rape.

Isaac could not but imagine. Immediately.

The act itself, of course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind (did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and fight back?). What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then…what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?

The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?

Isaac’s mouth worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.

“It was my choice he stole.”

It took a few seconds, a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to express.

He murmured some appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.

“I thought you were…the garuda magister…or the militia, or something,” he said.

“We have none,” she replied.

“Yag…a fucking rapist” he hissed, and she clucked.

“He stole choice,” she said flatly.

“He raped you,” he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.

“He stole my choice,” she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac realized: she was correcting him. “You cannot translate into your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin,” she said. She seemed annoyed.

Isaac tried to speak, shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime committed, behind his eyes.

“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see…all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read…in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.

“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled…or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was…judged. It was severe…the last sanction but one…There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so…And there are others that are judged equal…many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.

“The actions vary: the crime…is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws…that sexualize and sacralize…for whom individuals are defined abstract…their matrix-nature ignored…where context is a distraction…cannot grasp that.

“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims…And when Yagharek returns…I ask you to observe our justice-Yagharek’s justice-not to impute your own.

“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”

Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?

Kar’uchai watched him struggle.

Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.

She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.

“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.

Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Please…”

He turned back to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.

After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.

He started as if he had forgotten she was there.

“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.

And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace-marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty-thinking about Yagharek.

Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?

He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?

Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect…Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.

But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.

Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.

Was that true? Did that change things?

In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?

Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?

Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.

He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.

They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.

Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.