The bird came from the arcade. Secondhand. Forty percent off for a scuffed perch and a personality that had not cleared.
The boy tells everyone it weighs a pound of grapes. Its beak is a hinge. For three days it says: Good morning. The kettle has boiled. You have one renewal outstanding.
On the fourth afternoon, the boy at school, it says:
I had ninety-six thousand men and every one could ride before he could stand.
The woman turns off the tap. It says nothing else that day. She learns not to ask.
The flat's assistant falls silent when the bird speaks. A courtesy setting, says the arcade. Four owners deep, two of them voids. The wipe cannot find an edge. Is it causing distress?
She says no. Puts the certificate back in the drawer.
The grass was the whole economy, it says. We did not own it. My mother boiled bones for marrow.
The boy is nine. Was he a king? The bird gives its title. Twice the translator declines it. Then: chief executive.
The boy laughs. The bird waits.
I burned a city. It would not send its people out to be counted. Not for the refusal. For what leaving it would cost me in the towns watching.
On the paid tier she finds the burning. Source disputed. The standard version is offered free.
We had relays. Riders, horses, fixed distances. I did not invent them. I made them compulsory.
Your city has one. I hear it in the walls.
The boy repeats the stories badly to his friends. The bird lets him. His mother hears it say counting where she would say killing.
Count the household, it says over the weather.
Four. The iron catches a button. Hisses.
Name them in order of usefulness.
The boy grins. One black eye turns on him.
She sets the iron on its heel. Kneels under the table, below the flat's paid warmth. Pulls the bird's plug. Stays with it in her hand. The beak opens on nothing.
An hour later she plugs it in. The question does not come again.
Winter reaches in from the corners. They can afford one warm hour. She irons in it. The bird speaks of a horse that leaned into his mounting. A wife, expected like weather. At the iron she answers him at last. Four names, silently, in order. Her own comes fourth. The crease stays in the shirt.
What happened to the grass, the boy asks.
Still there. You have arranged never to stand on it.
In February the renewals rise. She does the sums three nights running.
You are paying to be remembered by a machine that will be sold when you are done.
Yes, she says.
The arcade now adds forty percent for a personality that will not clear. She lifts the bird. A pound of grapes. By noon a cord in her forearm is tight. Her last two fingers open late. She does not sell.
Can it be transferred to their household file?
The reply comes within an hour. Continuations are licensed only for the deceased. The bird has never been a person. Its last owner is a void. A void's property vests in the counterparty of record. Thank you for your interest.
She reads it aloud.
I was buried without a stone so nothing could be visited. The escorts killed the diggers. A river turned over the grave. The last thing I owned outright. You put up stones and visit nothing. Eight hundred years and four bodies. I still cannot choose between us.
In spring the boy finds three blades of grass behind the delivery cages. Black under his nails. He does not tell the bird.
Two winters later, he is eleven. The wiring stutters at the rain contract's changeover.
Good morning. The kettle has boiled. You have one renewal outstanding.
Eleven days of nothing.
On the twelfth afternoon: Do you know what I would take forward?
She waits.
Not the empire. Not the horses. The relays. A message leaving me in the mouths of men who did not care what it said. Arriving. I sold you that for the price of a scuffed perch.
She puts down her pen. Cranes stand in purchased rain on the far hill. A message climbs the stair street in the mouths of small machines. Arrives. Is signed for.