But the warp and weft of this weave were far looser than the filters of her memory, and it was an easy thing to unravel them. She called a swarm of red beetles, a cloud of mites, and a blue beetle. She extracted the chemicals she needed, and simply rewove the pattern of the filter. Some would have unstitched it completely, but in her time, too much tampering warned the conjurer on duty, and she wanted as little interference as possible, even if all the true conjurers were long dead.

She slipped through the benign section of the filter and onto the garden walk. Inside the filter, the air was moist, balmy, like a spring day in the Tirhani lowlands. Giant plants stretched above her, their weepy, massive leaves reducing the impact of the dangerous sunlight that trickled through the filter. Inside, there were no walls around the estate, just the greenery, which created a luxurious privacy screen.

From the height of a splayed, variegated leaf the size of a tea table, a pale green lizard regarded her. She never understood why her family insisted on keeping lizards. Unlike the bugs, they weren’t good for anything but eating.

She pushed further into the lush little jungle. The path she took was laid with blue stones imported from Tirhan. Along the circuitous walk, she passed an open-air tent splashed with ornately decorated pillows. The space was dominated by a low tea table of real wood. The tent was different, but she remembered playing in a space much like it as a child. She had caught and killed lizards there, too, and cooked them over a smoky fire until the housekeeper found her and raised an alarm throughout the whole house, fearful not so much of a spreading fire but of the callous destruction of the garden’s resources for something so banal as a real wood fire.

She rounded a bend in the path, and came upon the house. The primary residence was made from bug secretions, built up around an old deadtech foundation whose corrugated patches of rust and decay could still be seen floating within the secretions along the upper stories. The lower half of the house had been set with green and gold tiles. A single arched doorway led into the house—but of course, there was no physical door in that doorway. Just a filter. Only authorized Family members would get through it.

She stepped onto the tiled front patio and passed under the arch into the bright open courtyard. A fountain bubbled at the center of it, twisted into the form of a giant, undulating centipede, half again as tall as she was. A small child played in one of the massive garden planters lining the yard. Pink and crimson blooms towered over the child, each flower as large as the child’s head.