“I’m not going to like you,” I told her. “Your friends killed my friends. There’s no payback for a debt as big as the one you owe me.”
She was studying me curiously, a furrow between her black brows. The shimmer of blue iridescence on her hair was long vanished, dulled by grease and dirt. I’d taken sponge baths when I could, but we were both filthy.
“So what debt are you trying to pay back with all this doing things for other people, babes? What sin do you think you owe an unpaybackable debt for?”
“Sin is a null concept,” I said.
“So why all this fuss about service, then?”
The chilled clench in my stomach didn’t ease when I drank hot miso broth. I didn’t look at her. “It’s as good a reason to live as any.”
“Okay,” she said. “What about what you want?”
I shrugged. “What about what I want?”
“You serve other people’s needs. Who serves yours?”
“What if what I need is to feel valuable to a community? To feel like I’m contributing and supporting my fellows.”
“That’s certainly what you’ve been brainwashed into feeling. Your entire life.”
“Maybe it’s who I am.”
“Maybe it’s why Niyara picked you out.”
I admit it. I gawked.
She smirked at me, smug. She’d gotten my attention (and eye contact) now.
“That’s a sealed juvenile file,” I said.
She shrugged. Her chains rattled. Man, if I turned off my ethics I’d probably murder her just to not have to hear the rattling for a while. “Even in the heart of the empire, corruption spreads.”
“Well,” I swore. I wanted to spit, so I drank soup instead.
“You don’t want to believe that.” She had a cup of soup, too, but she wasn’t drinking hers. She was just holding it between her hands, which rested on her upraised knees. I had dragged in some fluffy stuff that might be a mattress and might be packing material of the sort with little stale bubbles of atmosphere sandwiched between impermeable layers, and made her something reasonably soft to sit and sleep on.
I had my own pile against the wall a ways away, though when I had to sleep I usually did it floating in the access tubes. I have never slept well under gravity. Or within earshot of Farweather.
“I don’t believe it,” I allowed.
“Because you’re an idiot who will sacrifice herself for any cause, no matter how stupid it is, if somebody she likes tells her it’s important. Because it’s been etched into you to do so.”
I shrugged. Maybe she was right.
Maybe she was winning the argument—a prospect that both scared and excited me.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I got up, brewed algae broth, fetched each of us a mug with a wide bottom and a narrow top. So strange, drinking out of open containers like we were in some kind of antique drama or something. I’d found them in a room with nonfunctional taps. Maybe they were drinking vessels. Maybe they were urinals.
I sat down again and we faced each other, drinking silently and in unison, cradling the mugs between our hands and letting the steam bathe our faces between each sip.
I realized I was mirroring her, and intentionally broke the pattern by setting my mug down.
You can just set things down. And they stay where you put them. I’ll never get used to that.
“Don’t you wonder who you’d be without the clade? Without Judicial Recon? Without rightminding?”
For some reason, this time it sank in that she knew about the Recon, too. So much for my privacy.
She must have read my face, because she shrugged and said, “You were interesting.”
I thought it was a lie. I thought she’d known something about me before we ever met. I thought that was why Connla and Singer and I had been fed the information that led us to the Milk Chocolate Marauder in the first place, and why they’d been waiting for us there.
They’d been a little early, was all. Had to leave and come back. Been lucky they hadn’t startled us off when they nearly ran us over.
I’d thought about it and thought about it, and nothing else made sense. Coincidence was possible. But what was much more likely was enemy action.
I finished my broth in one gulp. It had cooled enough that it nearly didn’t scorch my throat going down.
I said, “Without that stuff? I wouldn’t be anybody.”
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Maybe Farweather was better at using the Koregoi senso than I was because she was so much less self-conscious. Self-conscious? Self-aware.
She was what she was. She did what she did. I didn’t think she worried about the whys and wherefores too much, come to think of it. If the universe had been bent on handing me an example of the exact opposite of who I was, it couldn’t have found a better one. We might have been two opposite halves of one thing, complementary and conflicted.
I wondered if her personal life was a trail of carnage, too.
Probably, I thought. Probably.
She seemed not to feel nearly as bad about it as I would have, however.
It had felt glorious, not caring about consequences beyond what I wanted right now and was pretty sure I could get. Farweather just wanted what she wanted. She did what she felt like doing. She didn’t care who got hurt, and she didn’t feel any social responsibility to mitigate that harm, or seek compromise, or balance her needs against the needs of others.
I realized that on some level, I envied her.
Outside, the folded sky of white space—and my time as a free person (was I a free person?)—whisked silently by.
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And then there was the part of my brain that remembered my history lessons and the ancient books I liked so much because they were a window into a world far more alien than the one embodied by people like Cheeirilaq and Singer. That part of me also reminded me periodically of what the outcomes were when an entire society was controlled by predators like Farweather.
That was how we got here in the first place. Got to the Synarche, I mean, not got to bunking on bubble wrap in a stolen alien space ship a million light-ans from anything useful. People like Farweather, unconstrained, create conditions so awful that people eventually decided to change themselves rather than keep living that way.
The voice in my own head was sounding more and more like Singer with every passing dia. I wondered if my personality was bifurcating. I’d read somewhere that that wasn’t a real thing, but it sure showed up enough in old novels.
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“It’s your hypocrisy that bothers me,” Farweather said.
I blinked at her. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Well, you’ll give me a lot of pious nonsense about how rightminding is essential for overcoming our atavistic urges and living in a civilized society, and yet you are afraid of using it yourself.”
“I don’t consider it cheating,” I said. “I use it all the time.”
She stared at me. I refused to look down. We broke at the same instant, or gave up, or decided it wasn’t worth continuing. I heard myself sigh in relief, though, and caught the tiny smirk at the corners of her mouth before she controlled it.
“No, you don’t, babes. You let other people use it on you. Other . . . things. Artificials. Objects.”
“Singer is a people,” I snapped. And then felt terrible, because Singer had been a people, and now he was gone. And this . . . creature had helped kill him.
If anybody was an object around here . . .
“Keep his name out of your mouth,” I said, and then felt even stupider, because she hadn’t even said his name.
I was losing this round, and I needed to disengage without seeming like I was running away.
“Then why?” she asked, her voice low and intimate.
I didn’t answer. Because I don’t trust myself to make those decisions was not the sort of vulnerability you revealed to an enemy. And I am, and always have been, a terrible liar. Another side effect of growing up in a clade: you don’t get a lot of practice, because everybody around you generally knows what you’re thinking most of the time anyway.
“So you don’t think you’re a hypocrite?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. “No more so than most people.”
She snorted, her child, you are so tiresome sound. “This from somebody who doesn’t like rightminding for herself, just for everybody around her—”
“That’s not what I said—”
“—and who’s decided to have her damned sexuality turned off rather than go through the rehab and therapy to deal with her trauma.”
I stared at her for a minute. She stared back levelly.
“How did you know I had that turned off?”
She shrugged. “You told somebody on Downthehatch, didn’t you?”
I stared right at her and said, “The reason I turned it off is because I have lousy taste in women.”
She smiled, and I couldn’t tell if she was failing to take my meaning, or failing to take my meaning on purpose, or just didn’t consider it the insult I had intended it to be. Actually, she looked like she was taking it as a compliment, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
“You could get that fixed too,” she said, smiling smugly.
“A lot of work,” I answered, smiling smugly right back at her, “for so very little reward.”
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