“Don’t be boring,” I said.
“Look who’s talking.” But she turned away again. “A Koregoi artifact. She lifted it, and your clademothers managed to decipher the markings.”
“My clademothers?” It burst out of me like I was an unregulated child.
Farweather was lying. She had to be lying.
She didn’t feel like she was lying.
I took a long, calming breath.
She continued, “It was a probe, probably. Small. White space capable. There were plates on it made of inert metal. Inscribed with symbols. Didn’t Terrans used to send out probes like that?”
“This wasn’t Terran, though, I take it?”
“Definitely old,” she answered. “It was spotted near the Core, and declared a heritage site, but the seekers and scientists hadn’t managed to decode it. Niyara and some other Freeporters managed to . . . liberate it. It turned out it was a marker—a buoy, basically—and what it was there to mark was this thing.” She tapped the deck under her hand. “That’s how we knew where to look for it.”
“You expect me to believe that my clademothers managed to read the message on an ancient artifact that the Core universities couldn’t decipher? And that they were working with pirates? I do not believe it.”
She shrugged. “They were pathological, but pretty good archaeologists, or so I hear. Possibly it’s something to do with being so atavistic their own selves.”
“Ooo, big word,” I said mockingly.
She took it in stride, with a grin and a little shake of her head.
“So if your people found this, and my people decoded it and shared the information with you, why are you so keen on what you think I know?”
Farweather made a grumpy noise, like a disturbed cat. “Because Niyara didn’t share everything with anybody, apparently. She spread her information around. And hid some of it.”
“Why would she do that if she was planning to die?”
Farweather answered me with a question. “Haven’t you always wondered what she was thinking?”
I didn’t answer. She cranked around to check my face, then batted her lashes at me while I resolutely did not move sideways to make eye contact. “Haven’t you ever wondered how she felt about you? If maybe she wanted to give you something of value, that you could bargain with? She’d have to hide something like that even from you, though—because she had to know there would be Recon, and she couldn’t have you handing it over to Judiciary, or to your clade.”
“You know what?” I said. “I really don’t want to know. In fact, I was an ass to let you talk me into this.”
I hadn’t managed to pick my way through her defenses and her unfamiliar tech to find out more about how she was piloting the Prize, if in fact she was piloting the Prize. I hadn’t figured out how much she actually knew about me, about Niyara, about what Niyara had given me or done. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore at all.
All I had accomplished was giving her another avenue to get under my skin. My skin, which was marked with the stigmata of a murdered Ativahika.
I stripped the rig off and stood. This was a great time to make coffee. Farweather said a few more things at me, but she was talking to my shoulder. I had plenty to occupy my attention and my hands.
? ? ?
Rightminding is a wonderful technology.
I didn’t even think once about busting her nose.
Well, not that dia, anyway.
? ? ?
“The lights are dimming again,” Farweather said, after I gave her her coffee in silence and backed away to sip my own at a safe distance.
It had happened once or twice since the first time. We’d both largely been ignoring it, each of us pretending for the other that we had some idea of what was going on, I surmised—unless she was behind it all, but if she was, or if she wasn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to give away that I was completely flummoxed by asking her.
I wondered what new gambit this was. What strategy had changed her mind.
“Well,” I said, “my little box here isn’t drawing any power from any external system. What do you think might be causing it?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me, and I—having turned toward her a little as well—could just see the edge of her frown. We were like two cats spatting, each refusing to yield turf or acknowledge the existence of the other.
“I just don’t know,” she said.
Well, that was a terrible answer.
I finished the coffee. I turned around and came toward her, looked at her. She rose, and came to look at me. She studied my face; I felt the beginnings of a connection. Some comprehension. A bridge between us.
She said, “Maybe we could, after all, find common ground. Work together. Maybe we can team up.”
I said, “I need to go home, Farweather.”
She smirked bitterly. “So do I.”
“That didn’t sound like a decision, exactly.”
“No,” she said. “Nor loyalty.”
I wondered if she really was a human bomb. Like Niyara.
Niyara had chosen it, though.
I waited. We stood, facing each other. I knew I was too close; but I wanted to be there.
This is a bad idea, said the little voice in my head. My own internalized ghost of Singer. Haimey, step back.
She moved so fast I didn’t even see her, swinging with one straight arm, taking a single lunge step forward, and clapping her cupped left hand against my right temple with force and accuracy.
I fell to the floor. I felt the impact on my limbs and body, treacherous gravity. Treacherous gravity.
Treacherous gravity. My ally in this fight!
She’d—what had she done?
I tried to reach out into the parasite, to slam Farweather back against the wall, but all I got was a tickle of presence and then a crushing, incapacitating pain. Not from the fall; from my chest and my belly. From my heart.
I’m having a heart attack. She’s somehow triggered a heart attack. I am going to die right here.
CHAPTER 21
IT HURT SO MUCH, I wished I would die. I was felled, like a tree. Like an ox. Like all those primitive, atavistic things that humans used to fell with their primitive, atavistic tools. The hard way. An axe through the heartwood; a hammer at the center of an X drawn between the ears and eyes.
Swing hard; follow through to the other side of whatever you are swinging at.
Zanya Farweather had been swinging at my soul.
My identity, my selfhood. The person I’d been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.
She hadn’t really done anything to me physically. This was just what a broken heart felt like.
I’m an engineer. The little bit of my brain that stayed clear and focused in a crisis asserted itself, contemplated the problem. My fox wasn’t working.
I curled in on myself. The pain was physical, immobilizing. As if I had been electrocuted.
Which is another way they used to fell animals, and people.
I couldn’t . . . think. My mind skittered, blurred. I decided I needed to stand up; started to. Some indeterminate time later I realized I was still lying there. It seemed fine.
Somebody was touching me. Farweather. I wanted to recoil, but instead my body twitched feebly and lay still. She had pillowed my head on something uncomfortable, bony and soft. Her thigh. She petted my hair.
“Rest,” she said. “I’ve got you.”
I tried to organize myself, my thoughts. Tune the pain and grief and confusion down. Reflexively, I reached for that solace.
It wasn’t there. Concentration failed me. I wasn’t . . . unconscious, exactly. But I also wasn’t aware. The world swam fuzzily, as if on the other side of a high fever, a concussion, a heavy drunk or other mild poisoning. My limbs didn’t respond when I told them to, or when they did, they didn’t behave in the ways I desired. Like a small child who couldn’t quite get the stylus to move properly on the pad to make the smooth line she envisions.
Eventually, I slept.
? ? ?
I awoke several times into half-awareness and hungover discomfort before the final time, when I swam up into something like real consciousness. My body ached; I huddled in nausea. My skin felt chafed where the edges of my suit touched.
Farweather was right beside me. She seemed to be sleeping, sitting upright against the wall. She’d dragged me onto her improvised mattress. When I moved, the materials rustled, and she stirred.
“Drink this,” she said, when my eyes opened. She handed me a squeeze bulb of something green—an electrolyte drink from her stores.
The chain I’d put on her rattled as she did it; she didn’t seem to have gotten free.
I took the bulb, tried to sit up, and rapidly thought better of it. I lay back down and tried to remember exactly what had happened.
“How long?” I asked.
“About twelve hours,” she said. “The vascular effects should be wearing off by now. You might have some memory and attention deficits for a while. Drink.”
There was a bulb in my hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from, though it looked like the ones in her stores. I put it to my lips and bit down on the valve.