Liu Shen

Appearance

Shen is tall without looking large. His rescue reach frame adds leverage to his arms without changing his human proportions. The joints are old, quiet, and wrapped in cream cloth where the plating rubs. He has a composed, weathered face, long black hair tied beneath a compact cybernetic crown, and a neat moustache and short beard. Low-profile acoustic implants trace his temples. A worn jade-green sash crosses his cream armored coat. His paired ceramic-hilt blades hang from one ring and move as a set.

He carries the copper oath ledger inside his coat. The cover bears three thumbprints beneath a pressed synthetic peach flower. Removing the ledger would make him look like a negotiator. Carrying it makes him look like a government with one citizen.

Voice

Shen speaks softly and uses names often. He asks short questions. He gives people enough silence to hear their own answer. When angry, he becomes more polite and begins writing.

He never discusses the seven people left outside Peach House after the shutter warped a second time. The Compact saved eleven. Public records list eighteen at the door. Shen keeps the difference on the first page of the ledger and never opens it where anyone can see.

Signature and Tells

His pet peeve is a promise made with vague time. "Soon" stops every meeting until someone names an hour. He uses the rescue blades as levers, braces, and measuring bars. Guan Tao keeps them sharp. Zhang Lei insists this defeats their purpose. Shen says a tool may have more than one duty.

The Cards People Bring Him

They started arriving in 2183. A prepaid card with a case number on it, one of the licensed districts' endorsement forecasts run to its natural end, carried down out of the Stacks or across from the licensed districts by somebody who has read it four times and wants a person to look at it.

Shen has no authority here and says so first. A pending objection belongs to a clinic in a district his ledger has never reached, and nothing he writes touches it. Then he does the only thing available, which is the thing he does with everything: he asks when the refusal was said, and to whom, and he writes the hour down.

It is not nothing and it is not much. The card goes back in the pocket it came out of. But a licensed-district file records that an objection exists and forecasts when it will end, and it does not record the moment it began, because the moment it began has no operative consequence. The copper ledger has thirty-one of those moments in it now, in his handwriting, under the names of the people who said them.

Nobody has ever asked him for a copy. He has told two of them that the offer stands.

His pet peeve is exact about this and he has not softened on it in twenty years. A promise with a vague time is not a promise; soon stops the meeting until somebody names an hour. The districts have solved the same problem from the other end. They take a refusal that meant no and give it an hour, and the hour is not the speaker's.