Ginevra has wasted ten consecutive cycles aboard Hu Shih.

It’s the largest man-made structure in the crowded Hsi Yu system, its full name the grotesquely bureaucratic ‘Hu Shih New Commerce Platform’. Porcelain teacup at her lips, Ginevra rests atop her promontory. Here, impatiently waiting in the seventeenth-floor café—The Regimental—she can see out towards the Southern tail of the station. There, concave causeways on either side host clear-water canals flanked with crowded high-income shikumen-style housing and luxury boutiques, criss-crossed with arched bridges held together by blocky, stained wooden mortise-and-tenon joints that, at the filly’s distance, look like fish spines breaching the rivers’ surfaces.

Her tea’s surface tension shudders. Another bi-directional high-speed railway car disappears below, into the zigguratical Central Station above which the café sits.

Hu Shih is both an architectural and calligraphic marvel, constructed in the shape of a single chung pictogram. Its fattened middle section is a two-dimensionally trapezoidal k’ou radical, sixty kilometers length by thirty kilometers width, hosting the vast majority of industry, society, and governmental offices within its gaping maw. Bisecting it, running straight from north-to-south, is the cylindrical shu stroke that carries for a hundred kilometers. Both sets of bi-directional rail lines meet in the middle’s middle, at ‘Ma Hungk’uei Memorial’ Central Station where The Regimental lords.

It’s a notoriously inefficient public transit system.

One whose inefficiencies are supported by luxury rickshaw services, their handlers chiseled and beautiful, overly courteous and perky-faced, disenfranchised freelancers moonlighting in many cases as part-time tour-guides and escorts, whose multicolored, semi-digital, fragrance-embedded tart card advertisements find themselves stuck between bedsheets and drink coasters, swept into thousand-kilogram piles come synthetic nightfall. Refuse that is eventually jettisoned from the station onto the planet below, Hu Shih’s own personal backyard furnace, Hsi-Feng. The planet’s titanium atmosphere renders her uninhabitable which, coupled with a purely volcanic surface, constantly churning with crimson-white whirlpools of super-heated magma, creates the perfect landfill for the massive installation.

Externally, outside Hu Shih’s man-made tungsten exterior, vibrant live-in hung-t’ou taxi services swim silent circles around the station. The individual transport vessels, space for one passenger at luxury, six at most, are spotted out the millions of portholes. Inside cockpits, the pilots reside with families, children, many spending the majority of their lives in such anchored flotillas, unable or unwilling to afford living quarters aboard Hu Shih. The station’s central traffic control monitors these arcing fireflies, chittering amongst themselves through walkie-talkie webs, their thousands of contorting flightpaths tracked on datascreens with white tails, looking like silkworms building cocoon. They pluck passengers from airlocks at all synthetic hours of the daily cycle, hurriedly delivering them home after long workdays and drinking binges—one affair normally bleeding into the next.

At Hu Shih’s nonexistent twentieth floor, three invisible stories above the café’s curved flush-gabled roofing, holographic clouds provide shade for twelve million inhabitants. Below, echoing across the rotunda, in the Tung Tayu Memorial Park, groups of people, bureaucrats and schoolchildren, retirees and hydroponic farmers, sanitation specialists and investment bankers, perform their midday radio calisthenics.

Performances to be answered with the customary noise complaints.

Their to-and-fro square dancing to bass-boosted erhu plucks combines with saccharine singing-cum-yowling, belted from pirate radio broadcasts run on a semi-legal basis, many hidden within the system’s countless hollowed-out asteroids. The dancers move within an ecosystem of wandering water-painting calligraphists and busybodies collecting refuse for recycling bounties. Their lines of perfect harmony are like schools of fish, their loafers, combat boots, lotus shoes, and flip-flops keeping a perfected, cacophonic tempo that slaps against the marble walls of Hu Shih’s nearby skyscrapers, heard even at The Regimental’s wide-open windows, dancers’ sweat and cigarette smoke intermingling into the recognizable stench of his synthetic space-station-state.

The waitress refills Ginevra’s tea. The filly tap-taps her left hand atop the table twice, a learned gesture of a silent thank-you. She guzzles the herbalist’s concoction of red ginseng, chemical powder-milk, and rehydrated goji before finishing her cup, using the hot water to choke down two more anti-psychotics. The paper at the other end of her table is replaced with the afternoon’s edition, proclaiming Markets Close Flat Amid Corcyran Posturing.

It’s her personal alert that another half-cycle of her time has been wasted.

Ginevra’s supposed partner is nowhere to be seen, yet again. Caught up elsewhere, many would assume. With no recourse of contacting her employer, the shadowy letter-sender who somehow exists beyond any normalized payroll system, she begrudgingly sits, watching the tea’s surface tension vibrate against another monorail’s transit. She’s stood up. Vulnerable, platted in place for too long.

A target, she feels, for the woman across the café.

That one, the chestnut-coated water deer in the blood-red pure-silk eyepatch and cinnamon-dyed cheongsam, her two fangs fixed with gold rings. She’s of middling gait and build. Youthful at first glance, spring in her polished hooves, yet deceptively mature. The incongruent application of gingering on an aging frame—pelt-softeners, sandblasted teeth, pupils dilated with energy-enhancing traditional medicines of mimosa tree bark and jujubes—makes her appear innocuous, befitting the long-cut dress that hangs off an ankle.

Ginevra has never seen the doe before. They haven’t even made eye contact for these past few hours, as Miss Cinnamon is more content with picking at her honeynut custard, sea salt sablé, and Fuji apple tarte Tatin, filing her nails, crossing and uncrossing her legs at the thighs. Her newly delivered afternoon’s edition goes untouched, ignored, as if she doesn’t care for news outside her immediate orbit.

Instead, the doe empties out the contents of her bag, a cross-grain pseudo-leather tote, part of the L’Altinum 2XXX collection. Her fingers draw over her chatelaine, inspecting her silver chain watch before rubbing in perfume at her wrists, an obnoxious stench of cherry and muskmelon. The snub-nose revolver at the table’s corner, its grip carved with penta-petal’d plum blossoms, remains unloaded as she inspects its hammer and cylinder, pursing her overdrawn lips at every click of the chamber, as someone suffering from an oral fixation may pantomime.

She’s killing time.

The doe’s chuffed halfway through her fourth cigarette when Ginevra decides she’s a threat. Not because of who she’s waiting for—because she’s evidently not waiting for anyone—but because of who sent her to The Regimental today. Who’s paying for that crimson pack of smokes, the packaging’s pilfered mouth hanging off the edge of her small table, wafting in the man-made breeze.

Sure, elsewhere in the café, next to the latticed oaken wood columns, paper dividers, and gold-red pictograms of fortune, luck, and virility, sit strangers. But they’re regular strangers. Unimportant souls who follow patterns, above all.

Like the mother on the left, near the sign advertising on-site wedding planning services in multiple languages, whose husband, the well-off banchiere will arrive for lunch and argue about nothing, spitting vitriol with hushed tones, as they’ve done every cycle. Or the sullen middle-manager scratching off lottery tickets, always lingering slightly too long, having one too many drinks for someone who has to work both the rest of the day and far into the evening. Then those bureaucrats, dressed down, suspenders sweat-stained, shoes spit-shined, discussing vote-gathering redistricting in shallow voices, careful to always sit in a different location, hunched forward, looking past their circular-framed spectacles and over their shoulders for the unseen opposition.

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However, where Miss Cinnamon sits is always occupied. Always by someone different.

Yesterday it was the portly human, circling hiring notices with a red-ink fountain pen, licking the tip before each stab at the morning edition, chowing down dry sugar biscuits and picking his teeth with a single pinky’s long fingernail. Before him it was another man, the stooge, ordering for two, checking his communicator for a sign of a no-show, an inevitability, before slinking away with a visibly stained pride. The woman with the short-cut blonde bangs that loudly slurped her over-sugared coffee. The sailor in his naval blues and handlebar mustache, devouring the morning, afternoon, and evening editions with an ambassador’s vigor.

Always someone, alone, with commonplace habits. Over-acting. Never looking in Ginevra’s direction, not even on accident.

She feels this sensation elsewhere, too, at the local branch of the Soong Regency where she sleeps, expensing away her valuable time, rarely able to rest a full evening without nightmares jolting her awake. There, the hotel’s staff never pries. Service is impeccable.

Within the Regency’s marble façades are porters who are careful with cargo, never giving her luggage an extra shake to see if there’s something worth pilfering. Housekeeping that’s always lingering, never finishing their meandering cleaning route—as expected—but never stopping to chatter to loved ones over their smuggled communicators, never truly wasting time on their employer’s dime. Concierge that never mince a room number, deskmen who avoid smoke breaks, valets that remember Ginevra’s tired, sunken eyes without a tip.

It’s an orderliness too pragmatic and perfect to the naked eye.

At the holographic singer’s crescendo below, the legion of dancers pivots towards Hu Shih’s Eastern Edge with inhuman unison, entering the final chorus with a synchronized wave of homemade hand-fans and colored belts of cheap see-through fabric with dangling sewn-in plastic charms.

Ginevra weighs her options. She operates her internal abacus. There’s twenty meters between her and Miss Cinnamon. Twelve tables, nine of them occupied, sixteen humanoids intermingling, eighteen if you count the under-paid waitrons in their powder-pink apron uniforms.

Miss Cinnamon applies another round of lipstick, Hsiaomei Rouge in Mistress (Shade 108), currently out of production, either acquired illegally or purchased months prior at steep markup. Her touch is soberingly confident, easily cross-crossing her lips with the help of her silvered hand mirror, never showing issue with depth perception. See-through eyepatch, Ginevra assumes.

She also assumes that the dull bump at the woman’s side is a weapon. Her pistol sits unloaded near her tea. Misdirection. Another object juts from her thigh, a bulbous handle, the skintight garment leaving little to imagination. It’s a projectile. Sheathed, no doubt sharpened and throwable. One estimated to enter at twenty centimeters on contact with bare skin, fifteen for an anthropomorph’s thick pelt.

Ginevra’s first thought is violence, as always.

There isn’t a clear shot, but one can be forced through the wooden facades and collected patrons with minimal structural damage. But any move towards Miss Cinnamon would be uncomfortably deliberate, as on the opposite half of the café’s sole attraction is the view of Hu Shih’s tired, industrial Northern Edge. Versus Ginevra’s half, where semi-supervised children lean out open windows, enjoying the pleasant artificial breeze, and one man sketches the Beaux-Art skyline of governmental palaces with charcoal.

Miss Cinnamon sighs, leaning back into her lacquered rosewood chair. The tart’s chest heaves, smoke billowing from between fangs, at momentary rest. Tantalizingly preylike. Too good to be true, Ginevra decides. So she searches her pockets, producing a handful of loose credits for the table.

The waitress is surprised, she says in a delightfully lower-class erh-hua dialect, pursing her double-you’s like vee’s. She asks whether Ginevra will return today, should her suitor finally arrive. A message could be left in her stead; a courtesy the waitress could happily perform with an implied cash injection. The filly declines to answer, instead only scowling, making her way to the lift, its wrought iron decorative doors fashioned into a symmetrical double happiness pictograph. The bellhop, a stout woman of unknown age with twin-tailed black hair, professional attire a warm red pseudo-wool, hands her a complimentary pink booklet of well-dressed, conservatively smiling girlies available for rent.

The elevator’s windows, recently cleaned, show off Hu Shih’s vistas. Lurching downwards, the most identifiable feature is a lack of airborne vessels. To avoid congestion, claims the ordinance laid some four-hundred years ago.

But at ground level, the arcade is filled to bursting.

The concourse is, in reality, three stories tall. Viaducts carry railway cars in from Hu Shih’s perfect external weather, their conductors’ seats nearly automated, occupied by lifelong bureaucrats with wrinkled faces. Multiple turntables redirect trolleys into one of the four cardinal directions, passerby fighting against rotating wheelhouse flooring and side-stepping soon-to-be re-electrified tracks. Vaulted marble ceilings are complete with perspiring moderne frescoes, depicting wars and colonizations, murals filled with pictographic names that, like the official-looking busts that dot ticketing counters and waiting spaces, exist as contextless calligraphy for the majority of hurried commuters who check their pocket watches, shoving, cramming into over-stuffed railcars.

Ginevra churns in the crowd, on edge, her hooves one pair of thousands that click-clack through the marble platforms. Like others, she silently shoves through the masses. Her body is rigid, every hair of her pelt waiting for the foreign sensation of a pickpocket or assassin. Instead, as she jostles, it’s the innocuous feeling of a well-armed populace; antique revolvers, gas-operated rifles, and modern plastic-plasma armories.

A comforting feeling.

She feels no eyes on her as she exits into one of the many broadways, tossing the bellhop’s coupon book into the four-corpse-tall pink-periwinkle pile that has already collected near the road’s edge.

Rickshaws ramble past the glass-window department stores where she lingers. Other rickshaws wait at stands, the carts rented for the day, metal casings decorated with jangling red charms and done up with gold paint, their internal compartments cramped with plush white cushions and stinking of creamy osmanthus perfumes, covering the previous fare’s scent. Their drivers smile, athletic grins and sweat-stained statures competing for interest beneath straw hats or hair twin-tail-tied with ribbons, their runners’ posture and build a double entendre keeping many of them employed well into Hu Shih’s evenings.

Before the tungsten-glass storefronts stand doormen, statues at attention, holding doors as bevies enter, borne upon as prey by carnivorous salespeople, ones that offer paltry samples in exchange for exorbitant prices. She spots a tailor plying his trade, sitting at his plasma-powered loom, his window crammed with blank-faced mannequins pruned with finely tailored mandarin-collared Yat-Sen suits, pure-silk dresses, and antique military uniforms, medals and commendations like brooches.

Nobody approaches this storefront’s entrance.

The store’s doorman simply stares above the crowd, looking busy, counting the many colonnades and contours of the Central Transit Complex, as if he’s never seen it before. It’s not long after that he’s accosted, chatted-up by a sultry figure in a familiar red outfit, Miss Cinnamon’s golden fangs sparkling in the distance.

Satisfied that she has once more become bait for her pursuers, Ginevra stops a moment at the tailor’s window. She leers at a purple, pure-silk qipao, neckline hemmed to strangulation, cut short at the knees and brocaded with gold-dyed flower petals. It’s much too narrow for her broad shoulders, too petite for her mannish frame, she realizes with a twinge of disappointment. Nickering, she departs, confident her tail will follow.

She walks towards one of the station’s many corners. Naturally, ergonomically, the recessed corner of a geometric figure brings traffic. The Near Southwest Corner of Hu Shih’s rectangular k’ou architecture is no different.

With the same number of structures as the rest of the station, originally laid in perfect geometrical precision, the lack of docking points has led to population buildup. Parkways, over time, have seen their buildings expand outwards and spill into the streets. Soldered metal, imported stone, carved wood act as tree rings, demarcating which constructions occurred and when. Marble during metal shortages, wood during marble shortages. Apartment additions have folded broadways into alleyways. Where six automobiles may have once traveled with ease, now only four can squeeze.

It’s a half-cycle’s walk to Ginevra’s destination, the station’s exterior shell.

The system’s real powder-blue sun has set behind Hsi-Feng. However, Hu Shih’s day-night dance follows the standardized galactic cycle, controlled by the concave, holographic station ceiling. This evening, the projected stars above are that of Corcyra, a small moon in what was once called the Mare Nostrum, near the galaxy’s traditional center. It’s allegedly the view from the cobblestone streets of Diogenopolis, the sleepy polis over which intergalactic crisis looms. These ersatz Corcyran constellations stand in solidarity with the nominally independent moon, under political pressure from external annexation, warlord posturing that threatens to kick off yet another galactic conflict in the already crowded list of pointless wars.

She’s read about it in the papers, like everyone else.

A single digital moon lights Ginevra’s way through the narrowing streets, now only the length of two rickshaws hip-to-hip. Laundry lines sway in the artificial breeze, operated by chain-smoking tenants. They’ve closed their businesses for the ‘evening,’ their corner stores barred with home-made imported bamboo roll-up shutters and temperature-activated non-lethal security systems. Superfluous, given the statistically-assessed lack of station criminality per capita.

Her destination is buttressed against the station’s outer walls. A bar—the Old Eighty-Six.