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twist you inside.
    He says I’m brave.
    I laugh at that.
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    There’s no windows in our room (the cell, Leonardo says), but there’s windows in the dining hall. While Leonardo, Fabiola and Mario whisper, I splay my fingers against the glass and look at the sky. The jellyfish ships swim in the sky, so pretty against the sinking sun.
    I want to be on them ships. I want to be onboard. I hope, I hope I make it.
----
    Leonardo gets scared sometimes, at nights. He dreams they’re coming for him again, taking him from his school, taking everyone. I lay down next to him and I pat his head. Yeah, it’s done, I say. Yeah, it’s over.
    He wants to know what I did when they came for me. I shrug. I tell him there were raids all the time where I lived. At first I thought it was just cops. Then I saw it wasn’t cops and frankly, it didn’t matter.
    He wants to know what I dream about. I tell him I don’t dream much.
    He looks all sad and plants a kiss on my cheek. I let him. I didn’t let the other boys, but I let him.
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    Leonardo thinks we can escape. He’s talked about it with Mario and Fabiola. I tell him there’s no way and he insists on it. Resistance. Fight. Blah, blah. I put my headphones on and listen to my music. He comes over, all plaintive, and puts a hand on my knee. Don’t I want to go with him?
    I like it here.
    Yeah, but he’s springing out of here one way or another with Mario and Fabiola.
    What’s the catch, I wanna know.
    Catch is I’ve got access to the main terminal. Catch is he needs some info. Catch is this smells like being used. I roll over and stare at the wall.
    I get him the info anyway.
----
    I know he’s going to betray me but it still stings when it happens. He does spring out, but just with Fabiola and Mario. They don’t bother taking me with them.
    It’s okay because they’re caught two days later and brought back. I see them being dragged across the patio in chains. Leonardo’s got a wild look in his eyes. He catches sight of me, standing with my alien advisor by a window. He yells. He asks me to convince them that they’ve made a mistake. Mercy. Intercede.
    My advisor glances down at me. I know how to say this, of course. But sticking up for a runaway won’t look good. I know it’ll go in my file. I won’t be able to fly in one of the pretty ships. Maybe they’ll even say I was an accomplice (and I was, it would be true) and punish me too.
    There’s one of them ships going by, iridescent (Leonardo taught me that word). It blocks the sun like a great whale, the shifts and slips away.
    Sometimes there are no words, in any language, to construct the proper sentence. I remain quiet as he’s dragged away.
    I’m brave? I don’t know. It’s called surviving.
    I turn on the music player.

Old Domes
    J.Y. Yang
    Friday, midnight. A young woman pants in the field in front of the Old Supreme Court, doubled over, as though she has run a long way. She is covered in blood, and in her right hand glints a weapon.
    Her name is Jing-Li, and she is a cullmaster of buildings. Of embodiments of brick and stone, locations expressed in forms that humans can deal with, difficult to perceive and even worse to understand. But she does not need understanding to do her job.
    The job is in two halves. Two old buildings—pre-WWII colonial edicts, ancient by Singapore’s standards—are being repurposed for conservation, their insides ripped out and both buildings combined to become an art museum. The first to go: the City Hall, the senior building that was once the seat of Parliament, whose blood is now making its way down the woman’s arms in rivulets. (It is not real blood, and it will fade as soon as the shock of the deed has worn away.) That leaves her with the old Supreme Court on the right.
    The old Supreme Court building: Child of the Great Depression, completed in 1939, constructed on the grave of the Grand Hotel de l’Europe, its predecessor in the sequence of colonial buildings that had