No one could stop her as she moved forward with this stubborn energy, no matter how slowly she moved. She swept over things and people, impervious to blows and shouts. And people soon learned to stay away from her, to take cover from her stinging secretions.

  She nearly knocked the door of the mayor’s office off its hinges, amid the screams of secretaries and the thudding of employees fleeing as she passed.

  Attan Ze stood behind his desk, looking at his favorite painting, his hands behind his back. He turned quietly, the silver robe with green streaks creating a slight movement of air that brought a subtle aroma of caramel to Seluma's olfactory antennae.

  “You!” she growled, her hoarse voice distorted by anger and exhaustion. “I thought you were a friend! Instead, you were spying on me!”

  She had extended a long tentacle from her right hip and pointed it menacingly at her interlocutor. The mayor stood silent, unperturbed, barely blinking a few times to shade his purple eyes. The only movement that distinguished him from a statue. Seluma could not even see him breathe.

  “You put a machine in my house without my knowledge! What did you expect to find out? What secrets did you think you could steal from me?”

  In fact, she never saw him breathe.

  She, on the other hand, desperately needed to inhale, to suck air through her pores to clear her mind. She fell silent, even more irritated by the other's calm face.

  “Well?” she pressed him, shrilly.

  Attan Ze Kosh craned his lithe neck like a sad swan.

  “I was not spying on you. Not me,” he finally replied, in a tone so low that the sounds still emanating from the devastated antechamber almost overwhelmed him. “This was a security investigation —an investigation that started from the north.”

  From the north, she repeated to herself with a gasp of fear. From her homeland? But no, she thought, there was nothing in her past. Nothing at all. Just a normal, quiet, fulfilling life.

  The mayor rested one hand on his desk and sighed.

  “A contraband, an illegal trade in singing sands. There was reason to believe that your place was in the network of locations where some of the gang members met.”

  Seluma rose even higher, reaching out as if she had been grabbed by the head and thrusting out a second pseudo-arm to intimidate Attan Ze.

  “Sand smuggling! How can you think that I am involved in such a disgusting thing? You know how I feel, you know I have always been against even the legal trade of sand!”

  Attan Ze suddenly became animated. He raised both hands, palms facing forward, to defend himself against the accusations.

  “I never suspected you, but I had no choice, do you understand? These investigators are doing their job and they suspect everyone. You can't tell them: No, this person is my friend, she's fine! Not that it matters now.”

  “You could have told me!”

  “About a secret investigation involving smuggling between at least five cities? Come on, Seluma, you are not so na?ve. I understand your indignation, but can you honestly vouch for everyone who visited your place? Can you rule out the possibility that smugglers passed through there, that they met there several times to discuss their business? Do you think you would have noticed? We are not dealing with amateur thieves.”

  The reasonableness of the explanation was still salt on a gaping wound. But was it just the idea of being watched that burned so much?

  “I know how some people see me. I came from nothing and made my own small fortune. I am also more educated and intelligent than many of them. They can't believe that my qualities are only the result of hard work, no, they have to scorn everything since they are not able to rise from the dust!” she said, the words gushing out of her as a low, rumbling gibberish.

  Attan Ze kept looking at her with that pained look, as if she were a child about to be told bad news. There was something different about the mayor, something unusual. He was less sparkling, lacking his charming smile. There was a distant compassion in his eyes, but his gaze was detached, like someone watching a spectacle from above.

  A pang of remorse for her rant came over her and clung to her chest. Attan Ze had so many loose ends to tie up, and she came there to be abusive, to rant about a stupid automaton...

  But damn it, Fuig had almost been a friend! How had she managed not to see, not to suspect? She had even noticed the similarity of his attitude to that of the bartender! He had been silent, tireless, impassive.

  No wonder. Only machines are that sure.

  “What have you found out?” she asked, still hostile. But now she withdrew her tentacles.

  “Nothing,” Attan Ze admitted with a strained smile that did not reach his eyes. “You had it working so hard, and often outside the restaurant, that our poor spy automaton didn't have much time to devote to the mission!”

  Was he teasing her?

  “So all this lecturing and then telling me that actually, no, there is no evidence at all that those damn smugglers came to me!”

  “Of course, when the automaton disappeared, your position immediately became suspicious,” the mayor added, the fluty voice failing to soften the concept to Seluma's ears.

  She felt her lower body give way. Her torso sank at least a hand's length until the stiff edge of the corset became a point of support.

  “Didn't you call him back?”

  Attan Ze's bare head jerked to the side in a nod of denial. The band of glitter that encircled his forehead sent a swarm of multicolored reflections dancing on the walls.

  “Suddenly it ceased all communication, giving no alarm or signal of malfunction.”

  “And you were unable to find out where it was, who it was communicating with?”

  “We didn't monitor it all the time; it was the one that sent us regular reports. But it stopped. When it missed the appointment, we found that all its systems had been shut down.”

  Seluma puffed like a boiler.

  “What a great surveillance!”

  “It wasn't supposed to get into trouble; it was just supposed to watch and listen! And anyway, don't tell me: it was followed by hordes of technicians...”

  “Like the idiot I met here last time? He didn't watch anything because he had to go dancing!”

  Attan Ze spread his arms wide.

  “The mystery of the automaton's disappearance intrigued me; I would have devoted myself to it, if other... complications had not intervened in the meantime.”

  The reality of the situation condensed on Seluma like a concrete shirt, crushing her with its mammoth weight. It was over, all of it, and she was standing there recriminating and arguing with old friends over something that had become more useless and transitory than a drop of dew.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Yet she missed Fuig, its silent support.

  Perhaps the head she had seen on the cart was not its own, but an identical one, a mass-produced model.

  “Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it fell off.”

  The mayor raised the glabrous arch of his eyebrows in a look of cautious disbelief.

  “Fell off?” he repeated, as if it were a new concept. He fluttered his lashes and pursed his lips.

  There was no time for such games.

  “Yes, fell off! Below. Down. Into the bottomless abyss over which Nelatte hangs. Do you know? Where an hour ago I saw a horde of desperate people disappear, convinced there was no escape!”

  Her voice broke, in a sob that immediately disguised itself as a coughing fit.

  Attan Ze turned serious again and nodded. He sat down in his upholstered chair.

  “I have heard. The Civil Guard managed to stop a second group. It remains to be seen if they won't try again. What I'm about to say is harsh. We have limited resources, and the priority is to help those who want to save themselves.”

  “I understand,” she replied. A foreign object scratched her throat. “But there are whole families among these fanatics, children who I believe did not choose this solution.”

  “I will do what I can, Seluma, you can count on that.”

  What more could she expect from him?

  His slender hands rested on the desk, fingers intertwined. The nails glowed with colorful transparency, shining like shards of glass and perhaps just as sharp. Again, Seluma had that feeling of strangeness, of standing before someone she did not know at all, and the suspicion bothered her, filling her with an irrational fear she had never experienced before.

  The desire to touch him, to caress his body, as it had been ever-present on that festive day, was now mixed with a subtle creepiness, the kind one instinctively feels when one's eyes catch the presence of a hideous spider in the corner of the ceiling, a moment before the mind recognizes its shape or even realizes that it has looked up. And her mind escaped the present moment, horrified by what she would see, by what she knew she might see if she concentrated.

  She found herself gasping for breath, delighted beyond words at the opportunity to return to her earlier speech.

  “It couldn't have fallen into the void. We would know. You see, it's not the fall that kills, but the impact with the ground,” the mayor said, and his mischievous, childish smile seemed genuine this time.

  Seluma snorted again.

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “No, listen. It is quite possible to die during the fall, from fear, trauma, cold, or whatever. Even if we assume that Faspath really has no bottom, those unfortunate fellow citizens of ours are certainly no longer with us. One cannot fall indefinitely without physical and mental consequences. But we are talking about people. It's different with a machine: a machine keeps running until the very moment before impact.”

  He nodded and Seluma nodded with him. She began to understand. Not that she couldn't think for herself. But Fuig was not yet a machine to her; perhaps the concept would never really penetrate her head and heart.

  “If Fuig had fallen, it would have sounded the alarm first. And then it would have transmitted, it would have continued undaunted. We would have received its messages until it was out of range. No,” and he emphasized the sentence by tapping the table with the tip of his index fingernail. “Someone turned it off, so quickly that the automaton didn't even realize what was happening.”

  “Is that difficult?”

  “Not if you know how. There are safety switches.”

  Seluma shuddered.

  “So it was true —it found out something, or the smugglers thought it knew and stopped it!”

  Attan Ze did not seem convinced. He pursed his dark lips for a moment, then shook his head.

  “It would not have been easy for a stranger to approach it. Either these traffickers had some really trusted clients of yours in their ranks, or it was the thief.”

  “The thief?”

  “Yes, the famous automata thief —you've no doubt heard of him. It is not a real organization, because the incidents are few and spread over a long period of time. But from time to time someone steals an automaton.”

  “Yes, of course, it happened to the rector...”

  The mayor let out a soft chuckle.

  “That's right, even to him. Strange smuggling. Not very profitable, it seems, unless they've found a way to reprogram the pink heart.”

  “They say it's not possible!”

  He shrugged.

  “They'll make something of it. A music machine disappeared from the gardens in Downwind last year.”

  “I remember it! Loved by the children who made a fuss to get it back. You replaced it, I think.”

  The mayor was staring at something at the edge of the table, a little in front of where he had placed his hands. Seluma could not see anything at this point. But the surface was polished and he could almost see his reflection. Was Attan Ze examining his own blurred image in the wood?

  “It was never found.”

  “A strange coincidence that the thief has now taken the very automaton involved in a risky investigation, and all that has nothing to do with the sand traffic!”

  His well-drawn little mouth curved into a polite sneer.

  “We've already talked about coincidences in this office.”

  The mayor knew where to sting, one had to admit. But just as Seluma was about to retort with a searing response, that sense of fear again made her hesitate. The languid eyes —indeed, Luoth was not wrong in describing them that way— of Attan Ze Kosh were two purple puddles in which one could get lost, but it would be a journey with no return.

  “I wonder if they caught the first automaton that passed under their nose, or if they waited for it instead... if they wanted it, if they ambushed it on his delivery round,” she murmured. “The professor was the last one to see it.”

  He heard the distant voice of the mayor.

  “Strictly speaking, the last person to see it was his attacker,” the one replied briskly. Was he laughing?

  The ground beneath her burned. Seluma barely moved in order to stimulate the lubricating secretions and to put a cushion, however volatile, between her body and the tiles. She stretched her neck, unable to lift the mass of her midsection; her telescopic eyes stretched in divergent directions, and when they came back into perspective, they focused on the aerial photograph hanging on the wall.

  Nelatte, seen from above, resembled a bridge over an abyss, a bluer stripe bulging in the center.

  How were the Corleroys transported by the Swallows?

  The question was about to form in the soft hollow of her throat, but she hesitated a moment too long.

  The mayor's golden hands gently removed the picture from the wall; a handkerchief appeared between his fingers, and Attan Ze Kosh carefully dusted the edge of the frame.

  “Are you leaving?” he asked her casually.

  “I don't know yet. Maybe yes, maybe not,” she murmured, reluctant to be sentimental.

  Attan Ze polished the glass, lingering for a moment, looking at the photograph, or the reflection of his own face in the transparency, or both.

  Then he held the small picture out to her.

  “Take it.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “When you leave, show it to those you meet. To those who have never been here. Talk about Nelatte, remember it, make it known to those who have not seen it.”

  With this barely whispered exhortation, the mayor forcibly shoved the photograph between the pseudo-limbs sprouting from her chest, poking her with the sharp edge of the frame.