Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar Page B

smell of freshly laundered clothes. He dreamed of vegetables in oyster sauce and was nearly sick again, in the dream, though he usually loved the dish. The idea of food was nauseating. The voices, for some reason, agreed with him.
      The voices accompanied him into the dreams. Like old uncles, unable to shut up, narrating stories from so long ago no one knew or cared any more. In sleep he walked through a grey haze, a land of crazy jagged shadows, straining his eyes to see beyond the mists that seemed to always hover, like a screen, before his face.
      The voices talked about prime numbers. They seemed excited about numbers, and he had the feeling that, just as he was walking through this alien landscape, the voices were walking through his own mind and sampling the little world inside, like a group of travellers on a self-important sightseeing mission.
      He slept and woke and crawled to the stream and tried to drink the water. He felt parts of his body acutely then, strange pains in his arms, in his legs, cold and heat travelling across his torso, like ants – but they were not ants.
      He did see ants. He lay and watched them walk in a long single file, an army of ants, but when they came near him they neatly avoided him, forming a crescent moon around him and disappearing into the undergrowth beyond. His entire world shrank to the stream, the tree he lay against, the seemingly endless army of patient marching ants. Beyond that world were only nightmares – his father's corpse, the silent assassins, the endless grey mists behind which were voices.
      We can help you, the voices said, talking about diagnostics routines and recalibrating bone structure, cell augmentation and establishing a two-way interface.
      Help me do what? he said, or thought he did, forgetting he mustn't acknowledge the voices or he would have to acknowledge his own madness.
      Whatever you want. Power, riches, love, fame, revenge.
      Make me, he said, and closed his eyes, feeling the currents running up and down his body, the fever growing stronger inside him, consuming him until his mind was a grey and endless fog – make me into a gun.
     
 

PART II
    Chinatown
     
 

TWENTY
    Shaolin & Wudang
     
 
    One moment she was asleep, and in the next her eyes opened, staring at the darkening room. Listening. The house around her, familiar sounds, but trying to discern – what?
      There. The creaking of a beam where one shouldn't have been audible. Listening. There it came again, and now she had no doubt – someone was creeping along her own version of a nightingale floor.
      She reached for her gun. It was never far.
      And now she waited.
      Footsteps, so cautious as to be inaudible – but for the sounds of the house, as known to her as the streets of her childhood, every sound a warning, and lack of sound an even greater mark of danger – sleeping in the tenements, abandoned houses, in places where the rats formed an advance guard, where every footstep out of place spelled threat and risk. Early on she learned to always have at least one avenue of escape – and never assume a place was safe.
      The world wasn't safe. She waited, her finger on the trigger of the gun.
      When they came through the door they were very quick and very quiet and she fired twice.
      They moved so fast!
      It was impossible to escape a gunshot – wasn't it?
      And now they weren't there at all.
      Two bullet holes in the wall. Two black-clad shapes–
      She tensed, the gun steady, trained on the dark doorway. A voice from the darkness, in English – "We only want to talk."
      The accent strange, a voice from somewhere distant in the Lizardine Empire's domain. She said, "You have a strange way of going about it," and rose, still slow, waiting for the opportunity to fire.
      "We… apologise."
      "Show yourselves."
      To her surprise, they did. Two robed, hooded figures, the cloth black, the faces under the cowls