It was a forged document.

Yu was certain of that much, and yet this certainty gave him nothing. He had no idea what to do with the knowledge. It solved nothing. It sat inside him like a shard of ice lodged in thought, something he felt but did not know how to handle. The edges pressed in sharp and irritating, but there was nothing to do with it, no way to move or act on it.

Amidst all the humans Yu had watched in the habitat, time and again, he had never seen A-84R15. Though, he would not bet his wing on it, not with the size of the Barnstream population. If you scan one group after another at random – just aimlessly drifting with your field-glasses from the streams to the work yards to the living quarters – without fixing on any particular figure, it happens quickly enough that in front of your eyes, the sheer mass of flat flesh-faces blurs into nothing but crude divisions of male and female, young or old. There is hardly need for more. In the end, they are all the same, living out the same savage routine — fishing, fighting, feasting, fucking. Their stupid heads are full of it.

To distinguish any individuality beyond that blur, you have to pick one out deliberately. You have to consciously select and then repeatedly search for that same human whenever you return, until you can find her each time you raise the glasses. If you follow her long enough, you eventually recognise the patterns that separate her from the rest, and then you know where she will be at any given time of the day; where she sleeps and eats, what paths she walks, where she stands at the nets and where she swims, and when she breaks from the others. And if you keep at it, you begin to know. You know her day before she lives it. The days change of course, when you start with a younger one that then grows into an adult, or with a female that then becomes a mother, but even these changes can be foreseen and traced —

Yu’s head whirled around, his upper body twisting sharply as his eyes flickered across the kitchen. Then to the door of the walkway.

No one was here.

He was alone.

Still, he kept staring at the door.

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