Free The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

jackets out onto the dance floor and make slow turns around the parquet as the band plays Contraction mixes, songs that Raleigh has dredged from his memory and translated for use on traditional Thai instruments, strange melancholy amalgamations of the past, as exotic as his children with their turmeric hair and their wide round eyes.

    "Emiko!"

    She flinches. It's Raleigh, motioning her toward his office. Men's gazes follow her stutter-stop movements as she passes the bar. Kannika looks up from her date where they twine hands and nuzzle close. She smiles slightly as Emiko goes by. When Emiko first came to the country, she was told that the Thais have thirteen kinds of smile. She suspects that Kannika's denotes no good will.

    "Come on." Raleigh says, impatient. He leads her through a curtain and down the hall past where the girls change into their work clothes, then through another door.

    The memorabilia of three lifetimes lines his office's walls, everything from yellowed photographs of a Bangkok lit entirely by electricity to an image of Raleigh wearing the traditional dress of some savage hilltribe in the North. Raleigh invites Emiko to recline on a cushion on the raised platform where he does his private business. Another man is already sprawled there, a pale tall creature with blue eyes and blond hair and an angry scar on his neck.

    The man startles when she comes into the room. "Jesus and Noah, you didn't tell me she was a windup," he says.

    Raleigh grins and settles on his own cushion. "Didn't know you were a Grahamite."

    The man almost smiles at the taunt. "Keeping something this risky. . . You're playing with blister rust, Raleigh. The white shirts could be all over you."

    "The Ministry doesn't give a damn as long I pay the bribes. The guys who patrol around here aren't the Tiger of Bangkok. They just want to make a buck and sleep through the night." He laughs. "Buying her ice is more expensive than paying the Environment Ministry to look the other way."

    "Ice?"

    "Wrong pore structure. She overheats." He scowls. "If I'd known beforehand, I wouldn't have bought her."

    The room reeks of opium and Raleigh busies himself filling the pipe again. He claims that opium has kept him young, vital through the years, but Emiko suspects that he sails for Tokyo and the same aging treatments Gendo-sama used. Raleigh holds the opium over its lamp. It heats and sizzles, and he turns the ball on its needles, working the tar until it turns viscous, then he quickly rolls it back into a ball and presses it into his pipe. He extends the pipe to the lamp and breathes deeply as the tar turns to smoke. He closes his eyes. Blindly offers it to the pale man.

    "No, thank you."

    Raleigh's eyes open. He laughs. "You should try it. It's the one thing the plagues didn't get. Lucky for me. Can't imagine going through withdrawal at my age."

    The man doesn't answer. Instead, his pale blue eyes study Emiko. She has the uncomfortable feeling of being taken apart, cell by cell. Not so much that he undresses her with his gaze—this she experiences every day: the feel of men's eyes darting across her skin, clasping at her body, hungering and despising her—instead his study is clinically detached. If there is hunger there, he hides it well.

    "She's the one?" he asks.

    Raleigh nods. "Emiko, tell the gentleman about our friend from the other night."

    Emiko glances at Raleigh, discomfited. She is fairly certain that she has never seen this pale blond gaijin at the club before, at least, that he has never attended any special performance. She has never served him a whiskey ice. She wracks her memories. No, she would remember. He has a sunburn, obvious despite the dim flicker of the candles and opium lamp. And his eyes are too strangely pale, unpleasantly so. She would remember him.

    "Go on." Raleigh urges. "Tell him what you told me. About the white shirt. The kid you went with."

    Raleigh is normally fanatic about the privacy of guests. He