The Demon and the City

left."
    "You're a demon."
    "I might be a demon, madam, but I'm not a maniac. I don't slay people at random, I'll have you know. Killing people requires finesse, it requires style—you can't just leap on someone and start trying to butcher them."
    "What, like you just did?"
    The woman's voice was a razor across his senses. Zhu Irzh closed his eyes, to see if that made the pounding in his head any easier to bear. It did not. He murmured, "And you would be?" He wanted to hear her say it, though he already had a fair idea what the answer would be.
    "Colonel Ei. I'm in charge of security at Paugeng Mining. And Paugeng Mining owns the site on which there is one slaughtered body, and damn nearly another."
    "Is Paravang all right?" Zhu Irzh asked, not really caring, but feeling he should ask anyway.
    "He'll live. He's clawed and shaken, but he'll be okay. He's had the relevant biotic shots, apparently, so you're unlikely to have infected him with anything." Colonel Ei stood and crossed the cell with a long, lithe stride. She leaned over the startled demon, gazing down into his face. He could smell soap on her skin, as though she'd scrubbed at it. She took the demon's chin in her hand and gave a death's head smile that, to Zhu Irzh's horror, made his skin prickle.
    "I've placed you under arrest."
    "You can't do that. I'm an officer. I—"
    "I don't care which department you're with. You're on Paugeng territory now. You're subject to our regulations." She gestured toward someone unseen and the engine of the arrest vehicle roared into life. "I'm taking you to the nearest secure unit."
    "Wait a moment," Ma said. "You can't just arrest another officer, there are procedures, and—" But the woman turned and strode through the door into the driver's cubicle, closing it behind her with menacing care. Ma exhaled a long breath and rolled an anxious eye in the demon's direction.
    "What now?"
    "I think," said Zhu Irzh, pulling what remained of his fragmented dignity about him, "we're going to have to do what she tells us."

Fourteen
    When Robin woke, it was morning, with the warm sunlight of the port falling across the floor. She felt perfectly well. Her cough had gone and so had the fever. She got out of bed and looked through the door. She met the enquiring gaze of a nurse, typing reports at a desk.
    "There you are!" the woman said inexplicably. "I'll call Madam Tserai."
    Robin caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror on the back of the door before she went back to the bed, and wished she hadn't. It was sallow and pinched, smudged with the remains of her fever. Her eyes were bloodshot. She looked remarkably hung over. Jhai, on the other hand, was positively glowing with health, in a simple dark green sari and slippers.
    "Robin, you're better," she said, with a parody of concern. Then she sat down on the bed and started to laugh. There was a grim note in it that did not augur well.
    Robin waited to be told what was so funny. At last she said, "What's the matter with me?"
    "Nothing. Not anymore. What was it, Robin, were you trying to be hip, or what?"
    "What?"
    "Whatever did you take that shit for?"
    "I'm sorry," Robin said. "I'm not following this at all."
    "Well, you don't give yourself tuberculosis for no reason."
    Robin thought of the garbage bags rotting in the summer alleys, disease running through the city, changing, mutating . . .
    "I've got tuberculosis?"
    "Not exactly. We couldn't work out what it was at first, then Saira got hold of the hallmarks. Anyway, we found some of these in your bag . . ." Jhai opened her hand and the flat, white culprit lay on her palm.
    "What, those? They're our headache tablets!"
    Jhai looked at her narrowly.
    "Light begins to dawn, Robin. This isn't a headache pill. This is something you take to give yourself the non-fatal, no-long-term symptoms of the more romantic set of illnesses. Like TB, and like anorexia, and Shenan fever, and AIDS."
    "What!" Robin said again.
    "They're called Geneva pills, after the old conventions over chemical warfare. People take them because it's fashionable in certain more decadent circles of society to look beautifully wasted. So you get the symptoms, for a short time, but you don't actually have the disease. There's no need for a cure, because you're not really ill. You just feel and look like death, at whim, which is a prerogative of the very rich. When you get tired of it, you stop taking them."
    "But I was coughing blood and everything!"
    "Yeah, they're an