The Quantum Thief

Mieli clings onto her, the familiar feel of her body. The jewelled serpent on Sydän’s leg presses hard against her.

Mieli. The pellegrini’s voice in her head is like a cold wind.

‘Just a little while longer—’

Mieli!

The transition is hard and painful, like biting down on the peach-stone, the hard kernel of reality almost cracking her teeth. A prison cell, fake, pale sunlight. A glass wall, and beyond it, two thieves, talking.

The mission. Long months of preparation and execution. Suddenly, she is wide awake, the plan running through her head.

It was a mistake to give you that memory, says the pellegrini in her head. It is almost too late. Now let me out: it is getting cramped in here.

Mieli spits the peach-stone at the glass wall. It shatters like ice.

First, time slows down.

The bullet is an ice-cream headache, burrowing into my skull. I am falling, yet not falling, suspended. The All-Defector is a frozen statue beyond the blue line, still holding his gun.

The glass wall to my right shatters. The shards float around me, glinting in the sun, a galaxy of glass.

The woman from the cell walks up to me briskly. There is a deliberation in her step that makes it look like something she has rehearsed for a long time, like an actor who has received a cue.

She looks at me, up and down. She has short-cropped dark hair, and a scar on her left cheekbone: just a line of black against her deep tan, precise and geometrical. Her eyes are pale green. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ she says. ‘There is something for you to steal.’ She offers me her hand.

The bullet headache intensifies. There are patterns in the glass galaxy around us, almost like a familiar face—

I smile. Of course. It is a dying dream. Some glitch in the system: it’s just taking a while. Broken prison. Toilet doors. Nothing ever changes.

‘No,’ I say.

The dream-woman blinks.

‘I am Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘I steal what I choose, when I choose. And I will leave this place when I choose, not a second before. As a matter of fact, I quite like it here—’ The pain makes the world go white, and I can no longer see. I start laughing.

Somewhere in my dream, someone laughs with me. My Jean, says another voice, so familiar. Oh yes. We’ll take this one.

A hand made from glass brushes my cheek, just as my simulated brain finally decides it is time to die.

Mieli holds the dead thief in her arms: he weighs nothing. The pellegrini is flowing into the Prison from the peach-stone, like a heat ripple. She coalesces into a tall woman in a white dress, diamonds around her neck, hair carefully arranged in auburn waves, young and old at the same time.

That feels better, she says. There is not enough room inside your head. She stretches her arms luxuriously. Now, let’s get you out of here, before my brother’s children notice. I have things to do here.

Mieli feels borrowed strength growing within her, and leaps into the air. They rise up higher and higher, air rushing past, and for a moment she feels like she lived in Grandmother Brihane’s house and had wings again. Soon, the Prison is a grid of tiny squares beneath them. The squares change colour, like pixels, forming infinitely complex patterns of cooperation and defection, like pictures—

Just before Mieli and the thief pass through the sky, the Prison becomes the pellegrini’s smiling face.

Dying is like walking across a

desert, thinking about stealing. The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, watching the robot on the edge of the solar panel fields. The robot looks like a camouflage-coloured crab, a plastic toy: but there are valuable things inside it, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for them. And perhaps, just perhaps Tafalkayt will call him son again if he is like a man of the family—

I never wanted to die in a