The Quantum Thief

The sword is talking to me, showing the underlying structure of everything around us. This is a little Realm, a virtual world that serves as an interface for the picotech machine around us. I am a software entity, containing all the information of the matter of my body the palace disassembled. And there is something blue inside my belly, like a ghost—

Le Roi’s eyes narrow. ‘The boy is not broken,’ he says. ‘He turned out well. He outsmarted you. I will come and visit him in a hundred years.’

‘No thanks to you,’ I say. ‘And he is right. You have to pay for what you have done.’

He salutes me with the swordcane, sneering. ‘Then carry out the sentence, if you can. Let’s finish this.’ He assumes a fencer’s stance, his eyes a reflection of my own.

I raise the Realmspace sword with both hands and plunge the point into my stomach. The pain is blinding. The sword cuts through the software construct that is me.

And lets the Archon loose.

It comes out with my blood and guts, spilling out in a flood of data. It spreads into the walls and the floor of the palace. They start turning into glass. The walls of the cells come down between me and Jean le Roi, and as I give birth to a Dilemma Prison, I start laughing.

Mieli almost shoots the detective when the needle spits him out. A part of its jagged dark side turns into a naked body of a young man and falls forward. And then Raymonde is next to him, holding him up.

‘He got Pixil,’ the boy mutters.

They made it to the base of the needle minutes ago. It looks like the pseudomatter Mieli has only seen near Spike remnants, not made from atoms and molecules but something more subtle, quark matter or spacetime foam.

Mieli, says Perhonen, I’m not sure it’s safe to be there. There is something happening inside that thing. Gamma rays, exotic WIMPs, it’s like a fountain—

A ripple goes through the structure. And suddenly it is like smoked glass, dark, cold and dense. Like the Prison. He released the Archon.

Mieli lowers her weapon and touches the wall of the needle. It opens and accepts her like a lover.

The Archon is happy. New thieves, new things to make, new games to grow, in dense soil that makes its mind expand a thousandfold. Someone touches it: the Oort woman, the fugitive, returning to its embrace. It lets her in. She tastes of cinnamon.

Isidore aches. His body is new and raw, and inside, Pixil’s death is a fire. But there is no time to think about that, because suddenly he knows everything.

The exomemory is a sea around him, clear like a tropical ocean. Quiet, Nobles, tzaddikim: every thought ever thought, every memory. They are all his. It is the most beautiful and the most terrible shape he has ever seen or felt. The history. The present: rage, blood and fire. Atlas Quiet, going mad, labouring to keep the city standing. People fighting like puppets, the triggers and knobs and dials in their heads that his father put there turned to madness.

He speaks to them with the Voice and reminds them of who they are. The Quiet return to man the phoboi walls. The fighting stops.

And slowly, step by step, the city starts to move again.

So, here we are again. Doing time.

I am naked. I keep my eyes closed. On the floor in front of me is a gun. And soon, I am going to pick it up and decide to shoot or not to shoot.

The sound of shattering glass sounds like music, or like breaking the law. A wind blows through the cell, carrying tiny shards. I open my eyes and see Mieli, wings outspread, a scarred angel in black.

‘I was hoping you would come,’ I say.

‘Is this the part,’ she says, ‘where you tell me that you are Jean le Flambeur and that you only leave this place when you choose?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not that part.’

I take her hand. She embraces me. She beats her wings and we rise up, through the glass sky, away from guns, memories and kings.

21 THE THIEF AND THE STOLEN GOODBYE

I say goodbye to the detective – Isidore – in his kitchen, the day after the zoku brings Pixil back.

‘She is different now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why, but she is different.’

We sit around his kitchen table, and I try to avoid looking at the sombre, dirty brown wallpaper.

‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘it only takes a few moments to make you a different person. Sometimes it takes centuries.’ I try to shake off the green creature that has been wandering around the table. It seems to regard me as a natural enemy, and keeps chewing on my sleeve. ‘But of course, you should not really listen to anything I say. Especially about women.’

I look at him: a bony nose, high cheekbones. The resemblance is there, around the mouth and the jaw and the eyes. I wonder what Raymonde and le Roi would have left to chance. I hope there is more of her in him than me.