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  She drained her glass, sat up straight. “Tell me everything,” she demanded.

  Sensia looked at her. She looked worried, concerned, compassionate. “Lededje,” she began slowly, carefully, “would you say that you’re a … psychologically strong person?”

  Oh, fuck, thought Lededje.

  When she had been very young, there had been a time she could still remember when she had felt nothing but loved, privileged and special. It was something more than the usual feeling of blessed distinction that all good parents naturally communicate to their children. There was that – that feeling of being at the focus of unquestioning regard and care – but for a while she had been just about sufficiently mature to realise that she was lucky enough to have even more than that. First of all, she lived in a great and beautiful house within a vast rural estate of extraordinary, even unique grandeur, and, secondly, she looked utterly different from the other children, just as her mother looked quite different from the other adults in the great household.

  She had been born an Intagliate. She was certainly a human, and a Sichultian (you learned early on there were other types of human, but it was taken for granted that Sichultians were the best sort) but more than just a Sichultian: an Intagliate, somebody whose skin, whose entire body, whose every internal organ and part of their external physical appearance was different – markedly different – from that of everybody else.

  Intagliates looked like ordinary people only in silhouette, or in lighting conditions so poor you could hardly see them at all. Turn on a lamp, come out into the daylight, and they were revealed as the fabulous creatures they were. An Intagliate was covered, head to foot, in what was called a congenitally administered tattoo. Lededje had been born tattooed, emerging from the womb with the most fabulously intricate patterns indelibly encoded at a cellular level onto her skin and throughout her body.

  Usually, a true Indented Intagliate, as fully recognised by the Sichultian judicial and administrative system, was born with mist-white skin, the better to display the classically ink-dark designs imprinted on them. Their teeth bore similar designs, the whites of their eyes were similarly ornamented, their translucent fingernails held one design while another was just visible on the nail-pad beneath. The pores on their skin were arranged in a precisely formulated, non-random way, and even the minute tracery of their capillary system was patterned just so, according to design, not developmental chance. Cut them open and you would find similar designs on the surfaces of their internal organs, their designated motif carried into their heart and guts. Bleach their bones; the design would be stamped on the pale surface of their very skeleton; suck out their marrow and break those bones open, the ornamentation continued. At every possible level of their being they bore the mark that distinguished them from the blank sheets that were other people, as well as from those who had merely chosen to have themselves in some way marked.

  Some, especially over the last century or so, were born almost night black rather than nearly snow white, their skins, especially, laced with even more exotic and colourful designs that could usefully include iridescence, fluorescence and the effect of mercurial silver, all of which were held to show up better on black skin. Lededje had been one of these even more flamboyantly marked creatures, the elite of the elite as she’d thought and felt at the time.

  Her mother, who carried her own marks on her much paler skin

  – though hers were simple conventional ink – cared for Lededje and made her feel exceptionally fortunate to be what and who she was. The girl was proud that she was even more fabulously tattooed than her mother, and fascinated both by her mother’s wildly swirling patterns and her own. Even then, when she was just little, less than half her mother’s height, she could see that for all the greater area of her mother’s body surface and the fabulous artistry of the designs on her skin, her own flesh was the more intricately patterned, the more precisely and minutely marked. She noticed this but didn’t like to say anything, feeling slightly sorry for her mother. Maybe one day, she’d thought, her mother too could have skin as beautifully intagliated as her own. Lededje decided she would grow up rich and famous and would give her mother the money to make this happen. This made her feel very grown-up.

  When she began to mix with them, the other toddlers and younger children from the estate seemed in awe of her. For one thing they were each a mixture of colours, and many of them were rather pale and wan-looking; she was pure. More importantly though, the other children had no markings, they boasted no astounding design upon their skins or anywhere else, obvious or hidden, slowly growing, gradually maturing, subtly changing and for ever becoming more complicated. They deferred to her, prioritised her own needs and wants over their own, seemed practically to worship her. She was their princess, their queen, almost their sacred goddess.

  It had changed gradually. She suspected her mother had used all the influence she possessed to protect her only child from the demeaning truth for as long as she’d been able, probably to the detriment of her own position and standing within the household.

  For the truth was that the Intagliate were more than just human exotica. They were both more, and less, than extravagant ornamentations in the household and retinue of the rich and powerful, to be displayed like walking, living jewellery at important social events and within the halls of financial, social and political power

  – though they were most certainly that.

  They were trophies, they were the surrendered banners of defeated enemies, the capitulation papers signed by the vanquished, the heads of fierce beasts adorning the walls of those who owned them.

  Intagliates recorded with their very being the fall of their families, the shame of their parents and grandparents. To be so marked was to bear witness to an inherited debt which your very existence was part of the paying-off.

  It was a feature of Sichultian law – carried over from the practices of the particular nation-caste that had emerged victorious in the fight to stamp their way of doing things on the coalescing world state, two centuries earlier – that if a commercial debt could not be fully settled, or if the terms in some deal were deemed not entirely sufficient due to shortage of funds or other nego -tiables by one of the parties, then the defaulting or inadequately provisioned side could compensate by undertaking to have a generation or two of their progeny made Intagliate, signing over at least some of their children and grandchildren – usually though not always for life – to the care and control, indeed the ownership, of those to whom they were either indebted or at a fiscal disadvantage.

  Sichultians, on encountering the rest of the galactic community following their contact by a species called the Flekke, were generally quite indignantly insistent that their rich and powerful loved their children just as much as the rich and powerful of any other decently civilised species, and that they simply had an elevated respect for the letter of the law and the honour involved in paying one’s debts on time, rather than a reduced regard for the rights of minors, or those who were otherwise innocent but indebted-by-inheritance in general.

  The rights and well-being of the Intagliate, they would point out, were protected by an entire network of strictly applied laws to ensure that they could not be neglected or mistreated by those who effectively owned them, and indeed those who were Marked could even be regarded as being amongst the most privileged people in society, in a sense, being raised in the absolute lap of luxury, mixing with the very cream of society, attending all the most important social events and formal court occasions and never being expected to have to work for their keep. Most people would happily surrender their so-called “freedom” to live like that. They were esteemed, precious, and almost – though not quite – beyond price. What more could somebody who would otherwise have been born into grinding poverty ask for?

  Like many societies finding their hitherto unquestioned customs and ethical assumptions impacting squarely with the breath -takingly sophisticated summed morality of a meta-civilisation ine
stimably older, vaster and by implication wiser than themselves, the Sichultia became highly protective of their developmental foibles, and refused to mandate away what some of them at least claimed to regard as one of their defining social characteristics and a vital and vibrant part of their culture.

  Not all Sichultians agreed with this, of course; there had always been opposition to the very idea of Indented Intagliation, as well as to the very notion of a political-economic system configured to allow such options – a few deranged ruffians and degenerate troublemakers even took issue with the primacy of private ownership and the unfettered accumulation of capital itself – but most Sichultians accepted the practice and some were genuinely proud of it.

  As far as other species and civilisations were concerned, it was just another one of those little quirks you always encountered when you discovered a new member of the community, a rough edge that would probably get rubbed off like the rest as the Sichultia gradually found and settled into their place at the great galactic banquet table of pan-species revelry.

  Lededje could still remember the dawning of the realisation that her markings were not glorious after all, but somehow shameful. She was imprinted as she was, not to distinguish her as someone more important and privileged than others, but to mark her as a chattel, to make it clear to others that she was less than them: an owned, bonded thing, a trophy, an admission of familial defeat and shame. It had been, it still was, the most important, defining and humiliating stage of her life.

  She had immediately tried to run away, fleeing the nursery where one of the other children, a little older than she, had finally and categorically informed her about all this, but got no further than the base of one of the dozens of small satellite domes that surrounded the mansion; barely a kilometre from where she’d started.

  She howled and screamed at her mother for not telling her the truth about her tattoo. She threw herself into her bed and didn’t emerge for days. Hunkered under the bedclothes, she’d heard her mother weeping in the next room, and been briefly glad of it. Later she hated herself for hating her mother and they wept together, hugging, but nothing would ever be the same again, either between them or between Lededje and the other children, whose deposed queen she now felt she was.

  It would be years before she’d be able to acknowledge all that her mother had done to protect her, how even that first deceit, that absurd concocted dream of privilege, had been a way of trying to strengthen her for the vicissitudes she would inevitably encounter in her later life.

  According to her mother the reason that she had been forcibly tattooed and Lededje had been born Intagliate – as would be the one or two children she was contractually and honour-bound to produce – was that her late husband, Grautze, Lededje’s father, had been too trusting.

  Grautze and Veppers had been best friends since their school days and had been in business together since the beginning of their commercial careers. Both of them came from very powerful, rich and renowned families and both became even more powerful, rich and famous as individuals, making deals and making money. They had made some enemies too, certainly, but that was only to be expected in business. They were rivals, but it was a friendly rivalry, and they had many joint ventures and equal partnerships.

  Then there came the prospect of a single great deal more lucrative and important than any they had ever taken part in before; a momentous, reputation-securing, history-making, world-changing deal. They took a solemn pledge that they would work together on this, equal partners. They even became blood brothers to seal the agreement and signify the importance of the deal to both of them; they used a paired set of antique knives that Lededje’s great-grandfather had presented to Veppers’ grandfather, decades earlier, to cut the palms of the hands they then clasped. Nothing had been signed between them, but then the two had always behaved like honourable men to each other, and taken the other’s word as being good enough.

  The details of the betrayal and the slow, devastating unwinding of that pledge were such that whole teams of lawyers had struggled to come to terms with them, but the gist was that Lededje’s father had lost everything, and Veppers had gained it all, and more. Her father’s family lost almost everything too, the financial damage rippling out to brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

  Veppers had made a great show of pretending to be supportive; in the complexity of the unravelling deal, much of the most immediate damage had been at the hands of other business rivals, and Veppers was assiduous in buying up the debts they accumulated from Lededje’s father, but always his support stopped short of preventing the damage in the first place. The final betrayal was the requirement, when all other ways of paying had been exhausted, that Grautze consent to his wife being Marked and his next child

  – and any children that that child had – being an Indented Intagliate.

  Veppers gave every sign of being devastated it had come to this, but said he could see no other way out; there was no other honourable course, and if they had not honour, what did they have? He received considerable sympathy for having to watch his best friend and his family suffer so, but was adamant that despite the personal anguish it caused him it was the right thing to do; the rich could not be, and did not want to be, above the law.

  The first part of the sentence, approved by Sichult’s highest court, was duly carried out; Lededje’s mother was taken, put into something resembling a coma, and tattooed. The night of the day they had taken her away, her husband slit his own throat with one of the two knives the original disastrous agreement had been solemnised by.

  They found Grautze’s body quite quickly. The medics were able to take a viable sample of his seed from him. Brought together with an egg, taken from his widow while she was still under from the tattooing procedure, the resulting embryo was altered, changed to become that of an Intagliate, and then implanted back into his widow. Many of the team who had overseen the designing and patterning of the embryo felt it was their finest work. The result was Lededje.

  The basis for the fabulous scroll work wrapping every square centimetre of her skin was that of the letter V, for Veppers, and the Veprine Corporation he commanded. Other elements included twin, crossed knives and images of the object the fateful deal had been about in the first place; Sichult’s soletta, the giant space-mounted fabrication which shielded the world from some of the light of the sun.

  Lededje tried running away a lot as she grew up. She never got very far. Around about the time she started to think of herself as a young woman rather than a girl, when her intaglia was revealing itself in its true, mature, astoundingly intricate and colourful glory, she began to realise just how fabulously rich her master Mr. Veppers was and how far his power and influence reached. She gave up trying to run away.

  It wasn’t until some years later, when Veppers started raping her, that she discovered that the richer the alleged perpetrator was, the more all those strictly enforced statutes regarding the rights of the Intagliate became, well, more like aspirations; general guidelines rather than properly enforced laws. That was when she started trying to run away again. The first time, she’d got to the edge of the estate, ninety kilometres from the house, after travelling down one of the great forested trackways that led to the estate perimeter.

  The day before Lededje was caught and brought back, her mother, despairing, had thrown herself from one of the towers in the part of the estate near the house Lededje and her friends called the water maze.

  Lededje had never confided to her mother that Veppers was raping her; he’d told her after the first time that if she did he’d make sure she never saw her mother again. Simple as that. She thought that her mother had suspected though. That might have been the real reason she took her own life.

  Lededje felt she understood why death had seemed like an easier course for her mother. She even thought about doing the same thing herself, but couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. Part of her wanted to deprive Veppers of the most monetaril
y precious person in his household, but a more important part of her refused to let herself be ground down to the point of suicide by him.

  Losing her mother hadn’t been enough, apparently. She’d been physically punished for her attempt to escape, too; a relatively unadorned patch of her flesh at the base of her back had been retro-marked with a beautifully drawn, exquisitely detailed though to her still inestimably crude etching of a black-skinned girl flitting through a forest. Even the applying of it had hurt.

  And now, as Sensia slowly let the memories filter back, she knew that the second time she’d escaped had been in the city, in the capital, in Ubruater. She’d got away for longer that time – five days rather than four – though she’d only travelled a couple of kilometres across Ubruater, the adventure ending in the opera house that Veppers himself had funded.

  She winced as she remembered the knife entering her chest, sliding between her ribs, plunging into her heart. The taste of his blood, the grisly feel of the tip of his nose as she’d chewed once and swallowed it, the shrieked obscenity and the final slap across the face when she was already as good as dead.

  They were somewhere else now.

  She’d had Sensia turn her skin from reddish-gold – too much like Veppers’ own flesh tone – to a dark, glossy black. The house and landscape had been altered at her request too, all in an instant.

  Now they stood outside a more modest single-storey dwelling of white-painted mud brick whose prospect was of a leafy little oasis in a great duned desert of sable sand spreading as far as the eye could see. Colourful tents stood around pools and little streams, shadowed by tall, red-leafed trees.

  “Make there be children,” she’d said, and there they were; a dozen or so, all laughing and splashing in one of the shallow pools, oblivious to the two women watching them from the mud brick house on its slight rise.

  Sensia had suggested they sit down before she opened up Lededje’s memories of the last few days and hours of her life. They had sat on a rug on a wooden platform in front of the house while she recalled with mounting horror the events leading up to her death. There had been the usual flier journey from the estate to the capital, full of stomach-churning swoops and zooms as Veppers enjoyed himself, then on arrival she had settled into her room in the town house – another mansion in all but name in the centre of the city – then she’d slipped away from a visit to a couturier, gouging from her left heel the tracer implant she’d discovered was there some months ago. She’d picked up some pre-prepared clothes, makeup and effects and gone on the run within the city streets and alleys, finally finding herself cornered in the opera house.