Sweat trickled down my back, and my palms felt unpleasantly clammy. Were the prisoners sick? I hoped there was a medic down here, preferably one who was also a shaman, in case our guests had brought any vengeful disease spirits with them.
I had entered an observation chamber, where a pair of crew members with data-slates was looking through an immense window into a well-lit interrogation room just beyond. I cloaked myself with Charm so I would blend into the back wall. Through the window, which I assumed was a one-way mirror so prisoners couldn’t see out, I saw an interrogator and a stooped man sitting across from each other at a table. Two other people, a man and a woman, slouched behind the bars of separate cells on the left side of the interrogation room. The man at the table and the other two captives wore matching plain dun shirts and trousers. I wasn’t sure whether those were their uniforms or our prisoner outfits. And without rank tabs to go by, I didn’t know which one of them was the most important.
The person being questioned, weasel-faced and of stringy build, met the interrogator’s gaze squarely. He didn’t look frightened, just resigned. His words came through a speaker in the observation room. “You don’t want to go down there,” he was saying. “No one has magic powerful enough to deal with that many ghosts. And even if you did somehow manage to get past them, there’s a chance the pox spirits still hold a grudge.”
Something about his manner of speaking bothered me. I mulled it over while eavesdropping, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“That’s not your concern,” the interrogator said. While her voice didn’t waver, I caught a faint whiff of fear from her, even through the window. She had to be really worried.
“What killed all those colonists generations ago was no ordinary plague,” the man said. “The Fourth Colony was one of the flowers of the Thousand Worlds. They had doctors and magicians and shamans as skilled as anyone you’d find in the core worlds today, but none of them could save the colonists after they neglected to appease the spirits.”
Now I knew what troubled me about his voice. Watching the holos had led me to believe that all pirates were ruffians who solved their problems by shooting them, and my experience on the Red Azalea had borne that out. But this prisoner spoke with the measured accents of a scholar. He sounded like the narrator of some of the recorded history lectures my mother had forced me to listen to as part of my schooling.
“That’s very interesting.” The interrogator said this so sympathetically that I almost believed she felt for the man and his friends. “But it doesn’t explain why you attacked us. Surely you knew that you couldn’t hope to defeat a battle cruiser? If you’d persuaded your commander to stay in hiding instead of ambushing us, you would have avoided this whole mess.”
I squinted at the interrogator. She wasn’t using magic, but it was a kind of charm nonetheless. The more she befriended the prisoner, the more he would let his guard down around her, and the higher the chances he would let something slip.
For a moment I felt sorry for the man. Since he was already talking to her, he would eventually spill everything. Then I recalled Sujin’s cries when the goblin got burned during the attack, and my moment of sympathy evaporated. The sooner this was over, the better.
The man’s shoulders slumped. “You’re military,” he said, “so you can’t understand. I’m not brave. I only told my commander what he wanted to hear.”
The interrogator raised her eyebrows. “Being a soldier isn’t about never being afraid,” she said, still kindly. “It’s about doing your duty even when your gut is knotted up with fear. But, you know, unless you’re afraid of bones, your commander can’t threaten you anymore—he’s dead.”
Huh. So this man wasn’t a pirate, but some kind of informant or advisor? Curious, but it made sense the more I thought about it. A smart pirate would seek counsel from someone who knew the history of the area.
The man averted his eyes for a long moment. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “I—I lost a lot to that scandal. My husbands, my children, my reputation, everything. The commander was the only one willing to take me on. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was something.”
I had to stop my toe from tapping. The cold air that brushed against my skin told me Jang was still with me and feeling as impatient as I was. Presumably they’d discussed this “scandal,” whatever it was, before I’d arrived. I didn’t care about that. I wanted to hear more about the Fourth Colony.
They went back and forth in that vein for a while, to my increasing irritation. Apparently the scholar—for that’s what he was—had, in desperation, made up an entire “ancient chronicle” in the hopes of establishing his reputation. Someone had caught him in the lie, and it had ruined him. The story made me uneasy, not least because it reminded me of all the lies I’d told to get here.
Eventually they wound back to the point. By this time I’d developed a healthy respect for the interrogator, who had been forced to nudge all the information out of the prisoner the hard way, without being able to rely on Charm. I paid close attention to her methods—it would be nice to have a fallback in case I was ever too tired to use magic.
The scholar bit his lip, complicated emotions playing across his face. He was making a difficult decision. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “Our commander was hired by one of your captain’s enemies. Councilor Chae-Won of the Pearled Halls.”
Jang, did you hear that? I mouthed.
There was no response.
The scholar kept spilling secrets. “She wants the Dragon Pearl so she can reduce their reliance on the Dragon Society. Whoever possesses it will control the next wave of colonization, and the Thousand Worlds’ expansion. That’s not just an ordinary fortune at stake—that’s guidance over our very future, and wealth beyond imagining.”
I closed my eyes for a second, flushed with fury. I thought of all the old clothes I’d mended over the years, the countless times I’d worked to repair the environmental filters and suits because we couldn’t afford new ones, the dust that got into everything on Jinju. Whoever this councilor was, I doubted she was thinking about people like me and my family, who could use the Pearl’s powers to make our lives less desperate. I knew, too, that my planet wasn’t the only one in the Thousand Worlds that had suffered from a botched or incomplete job of terraforming, or the only one that hadn’t been able to afford the expensive fees to set things right.
The interrogator didn’t speak, only nodded. I admired her self-control.
“We were supposed to find and claim the Pearl for Chae-Won while preventing Captain Hwan from getting any closer to it,” the man said. “But we hadn’t figured out how to get past the ghosts. What I do know is that, long ago, the colonists grew arrogant and stopped making offerings to the pox spirits, and the spirits took their vengeance by wiping out the colony, as a lesson to the Thousand Worlds. The colonists’ ghosts, in turn, became bitter and vengeful.”
“A lot of people know that much,” the interrogator said.
The man laughed painfully. “You mean they know the spooky stories they see in the holos, where ghosts come rampaging from the planet. That won’t be far from the truth, if you offend them. And it seems to be what your captain is spoiling to do. It can’t end well.”
That did sound like Hwan’s plan, based on what I’d read in his private log. Dread seized me. Had he gotten my brother embroiled with not only angry ghosts but also pox spirits?
To my frustration, the interrogator said, “You sound tired. It’s time for you to have a break. Let’s get some food into you.”
I wasn’t about to hang around to watch the man eat, and I didn’t want the interrogator to catch me, either, so I hightailed it out of there before the observers could turn and notice me. Jang saved me from taking a wrong turn, and I murmured a hasty thank-you to him.
My thoughts churned as I headed toward Lieutenant Ju-Won’s station to report in, however belatedly. Captain Hwan wanted the Dragon Pearl as a weapon of one kind, and his enemies wanted it as a weapon of another. Even worse, getting to the Pearl—and finding my brother—sounded like it would require finessing my way past spirits who’d held a grudge for a couple of centuries. I liked the whole situation less and less. But I couldn’t give up now.
“You got lost again?” the lieutenant demanded when I checked in.