The pit was an ugly chunk of a room, weirdly lit by panels set between the three sets of elevator doors along its curving back wall. Faint shadows shifted and rippled across the floor, leading Skye to glance up, at the domed observation bubble, and the faces of nearly two hundred ados staring down at her. Buyu was there. He gave her a thumbs-up. Skye pretended not to see.

She straightened her shoulders, glancing nervously at Commandant Penwo’s office, sheltered behind a transparent wall on one side of the jump pit. She could see him, dressed in street clothes and rocking in a high-back chair. He didn’t look happy. He wanted to veto this jump, but Skye was fourteen now, and by Silk’s city charter that meant she was free to do any activity approved for ados. It was a giddy freedom that she had been cherishing over the five days since her birthday.

Penwo caught her glance. He shook his head. “Somewhere between six and sixty people lose their good sense,” he said. “We don’t call this phase ‘dumb ado’ for nothing.”

Skye’s fingers twitched. “Can you remember that far back, Commandant?”

Penwo grinned. “Have fun, Skye Object. Hope you live.”

“Forever.”

“I will tell you a story of these children,” Ky Xuan Nguyen said, startling Ela again with his voice so intimate in her ear. “It is said the Roi Nuoc are not human. Some say no children are truly human anymore. They are invaders, living in disguise among us. Aliens. They hope to keep us unaware until they reach breeding age, at which time they will bear only alien-type offspring. At that point the world as we know it will end. If we are unlucky, or undeserving, they will murder us all. If we have shown the proper deference and respect, they may choose to see us through an honored old age, but even so, we will be the last human generation. Any children we bear will belong to them.”

Ela caught herself barely breathing. She had heard this same story in Bangkok, after Sawong left with his lover and she was alone. “If you want to be afraid of something,” she said softly, “it’s easy to find an excuse.”

“I’m not afraid.”

No. Why should he be?

She spoke to the green-tinted mud. “People like to talk. But these are not evil spirits. Not alien invaders.”

“You’re sure?”

Her mouth felt dry. Sawong had left her with a thousand baht, a set of farsights, and the keys to his apartment. She’d been twelve. “They are just children.” She tapped her fingers, wishing she could see Nguyen’s face so Kathang could read him. “They are just children. I should do an article on them. That would be a good thing, if I show—”

“No, Ms. Suvanatat, that would not be good. You will not write about the Roi Nuoc. Not now. Not ever.”

Ela stood still, gazing back at the village and the silhouettes of distant women working in their platform houses, feeling as if she stood on the rotten floor of an abandoned tenement. Only a fool would take another step. So. “You think you can make it forever?”

“You are much like the Roi Nuoc, Ela. You are very like them. You could have found Sawong, or waited for him to return. But you didn’t. Why not?”

Anger blended with her surprise. He should not know about Sawong. He should not have bothered to know. “Say, did you want to do an article on me?”

“That would be difficult. There’s not much to tell, is there?”

“Sure. Aliens lead dull lives.”

“I take it we understand each other, Ms. Suvanatat?”

Oh yes. She understood him. He had made a mistake, talking to her about the Roi Nuoc, and now he wanted to pretend that mistake was repaired. Fine. “Of course, Mr. Nguyen.”

So what was his connection to the Roi Nuoc anyway?

With a few quiet finger taps, she passed the question on to Kathang for investigation. After all, she was not going to stay trapped in the Mekong forever. Someday soon she would be in Australia — and beyond Nguyen’s reach.

I lowered myself into the well’s dark throat. The shaft sweated a cold dew. Knobs of jade stuck out from the narrow walls as if they had been put there on purpose to make a ladder. I moved cautiously from one to the next. Jolly and I had climbed every tree in the orchard, we had scaled the wall around the temple at a hundred different points, and we had even climbed up to the roof once, when my father was away and my mother was busy with the new baby. But the shaft was a new experience for me, and I didn’t like it.

I could feel my shirt getting wet, and crumbles of dirt trickling past my collar. The smell of dirt was strong. Beneath that though, there was something else: a sharp scent that made me think of knives, or melting glass. The walls were tiled with the shapes of dormant kobolds. I could see their legs folded against their machine bodies, and their scaled abdomens, but the complex mouthparts that decorated their beetle faces were only half-formed.

I had never seen an unfinished kobold before. I stroked the back of one. Then I pried my fingers into the dirt around its pupal shape to see if it could be freed. It popped loose with surprising ease. I almost dropped it, but managed to catch it with my left hand, while my legs held me propped against the wall.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Jolly said.

I looked up at his foreshortened figure braced across the well’s throat, and I made a face. Out of sight in the well room, Moki was whining anxiously, wondering where we had gone. It was a lonely sound, and did not help my mood, but I had things to prove. So the pupal kobold went into my pocket and I continued down.

Praise be to God!

Beyel the poet was experiencing a rare appreciation for the divine as he retrieved the bowl of coins he’d just earned with his new monologue. If the army thugs had shown up even a minute sooner, he’d have gotten only a pittance. Then again, if they’d waited one minute more the last holdouts might have pitched in . . . but never mind! The idiotic Koráyos character he’d debuted tonight had earned him a lovely wage. God damn the army, and God bless the poor fool who’d dropped the bundle of Koráyos clothing into the back of the wrong wagon.

Beyel was so pleased he even dared to think his luck might be turning, at last.

He scooped coins out of the bowl, depositing them across several pockets so none would bulge too much.

The crowd in the marketplace was thinning out rapidly. Naturally, no one wanted to stay and talk to the soldiers. Beyel, too, was eager to slip away, but unfortunately he had to hitch up his oxen before he could take the wagon out to the traders’ field.

So, as soon as the coins were safely stashed in his pockets, he shaped his actor’s face into the wide-eyed visage of a frightened citizen, and then he turned around, prepared to assure the soldiers he’d seen nothing—which happened to be the truth.

To his surprise though, no one noticed him. Every one of the soldiers had already captured a citizen to question—the unlucky, the slow. Of these poor souls, most shrank from their interrogators, shaking their heads, but one man (no doubt drunk) pointed at a closed stall where a linen merchant had earlier displayed his wares. Beyel’s gaze searched the deep shadows within the stall, but he saw nothing, and before curiosity could buy him trouble, he went to fetch his oxen.

Two soldiers ran past in great haste as he brought the first beast around, but it wasn’t until he was backing the ox into place alongside the hitch that a soldier finally approached him. He was a middle-aged fellow with an ugly scar across his left cheek who spoke with all seriousness when he asked Beyel, “Sir, have you seen anything of a demon?” And when Beyel’s only response was a slack-jawed look of surprise, the soldier clarified his question, “It’s a Hauntén demon, male, well-armed and with long brown hair.”

Just any demon at all would have been something new to Beyel’s eyes.

“No, sir.” He found himself glancing over his shoulder into the unknowable dark beyond the wagon. “I was performing. I only saw the faces in front of me. I-I assumed you were after a thief or a runaway slave.”

The scar on the soldier’s cheek unbalanced a wry grin. “And I thought the shopkeeper who called us was drunk! But many reported seeing the creature. One man said the demon stood watching your performance, with a bloody mean scowl on its face. If you’ve offended it, best watch your back, I’m thinking.” His grin widened, and then he wandered off into the dark after his fellows, seeming none too much in a hurry to catch them up.

“God bless us,” Beyel whispered, because it was all he dared to say aloud. God damn was what he was thinking. And wasn’t this just what he needed! A vicious Hauntén demon who didn’t approve of his acting skills.

So much for a turn in his luck.